The Current Status of Blockchain in Healthcare
By Jerry Witkowicz.
We analyze daily news to discover; which healthcare companies are piloting, testing or deploying blockchain-based solutions to healthcare and which blockchain vendors are supporting them. This article provides a summary of blockchain activity in the healthcare industry highlighting the companies and vendors who are working together to test blockchain technology in the healthcare business vertical.
New Blockchain Pilots in Healthcare as of August 15, 2019:
Blockchain technology presents a potential to improve and possibly revolutionize how healthcare information serves patients, doctors, pharmaceutical companies and the entire healthcare system. Various use-cases of blockchain technology in healthcare have been considered and this article highlights current as of August 15, 2019 active pilots in healthcare system that focus on solving these business problems:
- Reducing the administration burdens in processing of patients transactions and to provide physicians unobstructed access to patients information
- Transporting patients to medical appointments to help millions of patients who miss medical appointments due to lack of reliable transportation
- Clinical data sharing to reduce hurdles that impede effective patient treatments and to avoid costly test duplications
- Payments tied to patient’s satisfaction aimed to solve health care’s biggest challenges – accurate and fair patient reimbursement against the actual health outcome provided by health care providers and drug manufacturers.
- Managing pre and post natal services aimed at boosting access to medical care especially among pregnant women and new born children, and reducing maternal and infant deaths in Tanzania
- Providing access to accurate and complete medical history across healthcare institutions. Histories across healthcare institutions currently rely on centralized systems which lack efficient mechanisms to ensure that medication histories transferred from one institution to another are accurate, secure, and trustworthy.
- Intra and inter health system medication transport aimed to enhance quality control of medicine, provide data for more targeted inventory and recall management and save lives
- Transparency and interoperability between medical systems to improve information exchange, maintain accurate records and to promote transparency in healthcare
- Improve clinical trials processes and record keeping which today have been found to be erroneous and incomplete
Active Blockchain Pilots in Healthcare as of August 15,2019:
ACN Is on Healthcare Blockchain Journey to Ease Admin Burdens
Arizona Care Network (ACN) – is a group of 5,500 Arizona healthcare providers who work together to improve the health of their patients by actively managing care for their patience with special focus on patients with complex or chronic illness, who are at risk for worsening health and face higher costs because of their disease.
Arizona Care Network (ACN) decided to deploy healthcare blockchain technology to alleviate administrative burdens associated with processing transactions in a secure manner, explained Jami Berger, ACN’s executive director of operations.
August 01, 2019 – Arizona Care Network (ACN) decided to deploy healthcare blockchain technology to alleviate administrative burdens associated with processing transactions in a secure manner, explained Jami Berger, ACN’s executive director of operations.
For the network, ACN is using the Care-Wallet application provided by its existing blockchain partner Solve.Care.
“What the application does is it allows for the user to have access to Care.Wallet. The foundation of Care.Wallet is on the blockchain. It’s part of that ledger system that allows for those transactions to happen and to be documented. Care.Wallet is accessible through the Google Store, the Apple Store, and it really is that gateway into the blockchain technology and the capabilities,” Berger explained.
Dr. David Hanekom, CEO of Arizona Care Network is certain that ACN’s blockchain based “Care Wallet” currently in use provides a repository of clinical and performance information, and it also rewards patients with care points which is a digital currency that can be redeemed for US dollars. David sees the opportunity in using blockchain care wallet to improve patient – doctor interactions as well as improve the pain points associated with the payment methodology.
Uber Health Partners With Blockchain Startup to Transport Patients
Blockchain healthcare startup Solve.Care has partnered with Uber Health to transport patients, Solve.Care announced in a press release shared with Cointelegraph on July 9.
The partnership will result in the integration of Uber Health’s transportation solutions into Solve.Care’s Care.Wallet, a personal healthcare coordination and administration application. Through the Care.Wallet, patients will be able to schedule Uber Health’s HIPAA compliant rideshare product to preapproved and predetermined care appointments, without the need for the Uber app, immediately or for specific day of the appointment.
Additionally, patients can pay for the ride from their Care.Wallet and easily share ride costs with their family members, employers, insurers and others. The collaboration also allows for coordination between patient, provider, employer and family members in relation to assistance, arrival, costs and schedule adjustments.
National Cancer Institute to share information using blockchain
The National Cancer Institute is the agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services, which approved a project to create a blockchain-based clinical data sharing system.
The project aims to build a blockchain-based information system for medical image sharing between different entities, particularly facilitating image transfer to enable a data library of medical images for an AI/ML application to improve image processing, analysis, reconstruction, and enhancement. We plan to test the system with real image data and assess its performance from a socioeconomic perspective.
EY (Ernst & Young) today announces plans to expand the current Health Outcomes Assessment platform through a collaboration with Sensyne Health and Guardtime. The platform is the first of its kind for the health care industry and will help provide an end-to-end solution for outcomes-based contracting; an approach that ties the payment of medicines to the achievement of specific clinical and patient satisfaction benchmarks and efficiency improvements in patient treatment pathways.
The collaboration will aim to solve one of health care’s biggest challenges – accurate and fair patient reimbursement against the actual health outcome provided by health care providers and drug manufacturers.
Under the arrangement, EY teams will bring independent contract assessment, contract management and automated business process experience to allow pharmaceutical companies and health care providers to share data and help manage real-world outcomes-based contracts at scale with transparency and trust. Sensyne Health will use its clinical AI platform to evaluate patient health impact. Guardtime will run its HSX bridge software, built on the KSI blockchain. Through this technology, health care data will be transported securely with a transparent audit trail allowing immutable evidence of how each data element is viewed and used.
>TANZANIA’S FIRST BLOCKCHAIN BABY RUBBERSTAMPS POWER OF TECH IN MEDICAL CARE
Tanzania has become the first country to produce a blockchain enabled baby in the world, in what industry players have billed as a major milestone in boosting access to medical care especially among pregnant women and new born children, reducing maternal and infant deaths while promoting transparency and ensuring donor aid and medication go to the intended recipients.
Through a project by Aid.Tech, an Irish based organisation and PharmAccess Foundation that offers healthcare access across Africa, the project, which was inspired by personal experiences of wastage and fraud in aid distribution, targeted vulnerable and under privileged pregnant women in Tanzania by using blockchain technology to collect data on each woman and storing it as medical ledgers which ensured that they were able to access pre- and post- natal services, and their babies once delivered never missed crucial medical attention. The system also made it possible for each woman’s medical needs to be attended to promptly based on the medical records that captured each woman’s health condition.
A Decentralized Blockchain Ledger for the Management of Medication Histories
Background: Access to accurate and complete medication histories across healthcare institutions enables effective patient care. Histories across healthcare institutions currently rely on centralized systems for sharing medication data. However, there is a lack of efficient mechanisms to ensure that medication histories transferred from one institution to another are accurate, secure, and trustworthy.
We introduce a decentralized medication management system (DMMS) that leverages the advantages of blockchain to manage medication histories. DMMS is realized as a decentralized network under the hyperledger fabric framework. Based on the network, we designed an architecture, within which each prescriber can create prescriptions for each patient and perform queries about historical prescriptions accordingly. Finally, we analyzed the advantages of DMMS over centralized systems in terms of accuracy, security, trustworthiness, and privacy.
FDA Approves Pilot Using Next-Generation Blockchain and IoT to Track Healthcare System Medicine Transfers
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a multi-regional pilot studying the use of blockchain-enabled data technology to track and verify specialty prescription drugs, to ensure safety, enhance value and improve health outcomes.
This pilot will focus on intra- and inter-health system medication transport and usage in North Carolina, Indiana and Tennessee, and studies the application of blockchain and IoT technology used to monitor specialty medication distribution across supply chains. Improved supply monitoring will enhance quality control of medicine, provide data for more targeted inventory and recall management and save lives.
Cigna and Sentara Healthcare have joined a new healthcare-focused collaborative that aims to build, share, and deploy solutions using blockchain technology.
The collaborative also includes Aetna, Anthem, Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC), PNC Bank, and IBM. These organizations will work to identify new ways of addressing a range of industry challenges with blockchain, including enabling secure information exchange, maintaining accurate provider directories, and promoting efficient claims processing.
“We came together to create the health utility network realizing the need to improve transparency and interoperability in the industry in order to improve healthcare for all Americans,” said Rajeev Ronanki, chief digital officer of Anthem, Inc.
“Engaging additional members across partner levels and industry perspectives will increase the network’s reach and ability to deliver high value solutions.”
Blockchain Technology In Clinical Trials
Burlington and Markham, ON, February 12, 2019 – Boehringer Ingelheim (Canada) Ltd. and IBM Canada announced today at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Orlando, Florida, their plans to explore the use of blockchain technology in clinical trials.
This collaboration underscores Boehringer Ingelheim’s commitment to healthcare innovation and marks the first time that blockchain technology will be explored in a clinical trial setting in Canada.
Based on the findings of regulatory authorities, processes to ensure the quality of clinical trials are frequently inadequate, and clinical trial records are often erroneous or incomplete, which may put patient safety and interpretability of trials at risk.
“Our guiding philosophy is to bring value to patients and the healthcare system through innovation,” said Dr. Uli Brödl, Vice President, Medical and Regulatory Affairs, Boehringer Ingelheim (Canada) Ltd. “The clinical trial ecosystem is highly complex as it involves different stakeholders, resulting in limited trust, transparency and process inefficiencies without true patient empowerment. Patients are at the heart of everything we do, so we are looking into novel solutions to improve patient safety and empowerment.”
Author Bio
Jerry Witkowicz – As a founder of Blockhelp.pro and 180FIND, I leverage more than four decades of entrepreneurial experience in helping companies put the value of their solutions to work on behalf of their balance sheet.
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