Josh Schoeller, senior vice president and general manager of the health risk solutions company LexisNexis Health Care in New York, illustrates the potential advances that the blockchain can offer to the healthcare industry and its considerations on security risks that technology poses.
The answers have been slightly modified for clarity and length.
Question: where is now the blockchain in the health sector and how will it develop in 2019?
Josh Schoeller: The promises of the Blockchain technology of connecting multiple data sources, tracking all transactions across the chain and then publishing the resulting information to stakeholders are attractive. In the area of health care, this translates into the ability to connect, manage, control and quickly update a myriad of data types between heterogeneous systems and stakeholders. The story is still written on what blockchain can offer our industry. But one thing is certain: health technology that enables data sharing will require high-level data governance and validation.
Q: What do you think will be the most significant blockchain applications in the healthcare sector over the next five years?
JS: Advocates say it will transform them and the quality of care they provide and pay, with better ways to store information and share it between providers, payers and patients – and even pharmacies, pharmacy benefit managers, pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors.
Results-based contracts with blockchain can better link costs and clinical outcomes. For example, blockchain could play a role in improving control capacity, detection of provenance and control for those responsible for clinical trials by aggregating, replicating, and automatically distributing data. In addition, blockchain could reduce errors and documentation problems of patients with conflicting data from multiple entities and could minimize hacking.
Q: What do the blockbenches of blockchain hospitals and healthcare systems know today?
JS: Blockchain's design does not meet all the needs of healthcare users. A blockchain network is designed to be transparent; there is no mechanism to hide a transaction. This means that everyone could see a patient's protected health information, for example, so that blockchain does not comply with the Law on Portability and Responsibility of Health Insurance. Furthermore, everyone could potentially see the details of the networks of the suppliers of each paying member.
There are also control problems. If a patient is unable to authorize access to his data in an emergency, who else will be able to do so? Blockchain is designed for transactions, not data, so the sending tends to consume a ton of bandwidth. This means that it is slow, which could also limit its use for emergency services.
Data quality is still fundamental. If the data are not correct, the errors will remain immutably persistent. This is a problem when the biggest driver of the blockchain business model design is trust. Because of the misinformation that occurs naturally, while blockchains are independent, it is likely that they will require an external central authority for validation purposes, particularly regarding identity information and position.
To attend the future Becker question and answer session, contact Jackie Drees at [email protected].
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