Blockchain in Healthcare
By: Neil Pithadia
This four piece post will discuss opportunities of Blockchain in Healthcare.
Introduction
What exactly is the elusive technology behind Bitcoin and does this technology have any application in healthcare? Blockchain, a complex and often misunderstood technology, has caught the public’s eye by its speculation and hype built around as a potential universal disruptor.
Let this sink in, if you bought $100 worth of Bitcoin in 2011, its value as of writing this article (April 2018) would be valued near $2,666,666[1]. There’s no denying that staggering numbers like that have caught the public and institutional investors’ attention. Yet, the underlying technology has several applications to our industry. This focus paper will demystify this technology for the reader, describing how it works and will explore potential opportunities in healthcare through literature search. This paper also will highlight potential applications citing real-world examples such as interoperability, security and smarts contracts in healthcare systems and will summarize the challenges it will need to overcome for adoption. Readers can expect to become aware of Blockchain technology and applications in healthcare after reading this paper.
- What is it and how does it work?
Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that can record transactions between two parties in both a verifiable and efficient manner that becomes a permanent record and yet is open to the public. Historically, we have kept ledgers private; recall your trusty checkbook. The underlying beauty of blockchain is that its applications occur on a public ledger and yet the parties themselves are anonymous. Pioneered by Satoshi Nakamoto, blockchain was originated in the crypts of a mailing list for coders in which he/she developed a whitepaper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (Nakamoto, 2008). “Satoshi Nakamoto” has been determined to be an alias for an unknown individual and/or group. Sounds fishy? Rest assured, the technology itself, if anything, is very human.
Every day, businesses engage in many types of transactions: transaction of tangible, real-world assets or things like contracts or intellectual property. In healthcare, we have a multitude of transactions: claims data, population health information and even personal identifiable information like medical records. All of these transactions require verification, whether it is a prior-authorization or eligibility of provider-payer. The underlying pinning of blockchain is a technology that verifies trustworthiness while making it difficult to manipulate the transaction, itself.
[1] Bitcoin traded at an average of $0.30 per Bitcoin in 2011 and had an average price of $8,000 per bitcoin in April 2018.
In our next post we will cite real-world examples of blockchain technology in healthcare.
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