Blockchain in healthcare: use cases for your practice

Blockchain is a relatively new technology, but together with other technologies such as big data analytics, IoMT, and 5G, it can help healthcare improve its traditional approach to health data handling and supply chain transparency.

The statistics on blockchain in healthcare predict a bright future for this technology. According to Research and Markets, the global blockchain technology market in the healthcare industry is expected to cross $500 million by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 61.4% between 2018 and 2022. At the same time, IDC suggests that 55% of all healthcare applications will have employed blockchain for commercial purposes by 2025.

As blockchain is gaining popularity, healthcare organizations are partnering with blockchain consultants to facilitate the adoption of this technology in healthcare projects.

Blockchain applications in healthcare industry

Drug traceability

This advancement is a part of pharmacy automation that is called to solve the counterfeit drug problem and enforce the Drug Quality Security Act, which tightens tracking and security control around pharmaceutics.

Counterfeit drugs are a considerable problem in the pharmaceutical industry. They cause health complications and can even result in death. Additionally, they account for a considerable financial loss in the pharmaceutical industry. According to The Financial Times, between 10% and 30% of all drugs circulating on the market are fake.

Counterfeit drugs also affect employment in the pharmaceutical sector. As reported by Eurostat, it is estimated that 37,700 jobs are lost in the EU pharmaceutics sector because drug manufacturers are forced to employ less people than they would in the absence of counterfeit drugs.

Blockchain is a reliable solution to ensure drug authenticity, as it permits tracking every drug to its very origins. Blockchain can be used to encapsulate information about the drug at every stage of its lifecycle (such as production, distribution, etc.). Every block within the blockchain containing drug information will have a hash linked to another block, and every block will come with a time stamp that cannot be altered.

In such a setup, circulating a fake drug will be next to impossible. Incrementation of transactions in the blockchain will be visible to all authorized parties, and a medicine’s movement from one party to another will be trackable in real time. Medicine consumers will also be able to verify the authenticity of purchased products by scanning the QR code and looking up the information about the manufacturer and other relevant supply chain participants.

Every member of such blockchains has particular rights: manufacturers register their products, pharmacies choose among available suppliers, and so on. Any pharmaceutical company willing to register its product or purchase a product using a blockchain will need to prove its trustworthiness to the controlling party.

As a result, blockchain implementation enables drug traceability and transparency, which in turn enhances accountability. Additionally, it offers an efficient recall system, allowing to identify the exact location of a particular drug.

French pharmaceutical company Blockpharma offers a blockchain solution for drug traceability based on machine learning. The company’s app enables patients to check if their purchased medicine is falsified by tracking the supply chain and verifying all points of shipment. Blockpharma claims that its solution helps to weed out 15% of all fake medicine in the world.

Facilitating clinical trials and research

Blockchain can help to address the issue of fraud in clinical trials. Fraud constitutes modifying information to conceal the actual effect of trialed drugs or any other treatments.

To ensure security and transparency of clinical trials, researchers can rely on blockchain. There, all documents created for the purpose of clinical trials can be time-stamped and stored securely. Those documents include project proposals, research design, surveys, blood tests, and informed consent of the participating parties.

Blockchain has many more benefits for clinical trials. It adds credibility to the research performed, as every document on the blockchain becomes verifiable. It also reduces audit costs and eliminates the issues of lost documents or datasets.

One example of using blockchain for clinical research is offered by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which is considering blockchain for disease monitoring. The Center says that blockchain properties such as time stamping, peer-to-peer reporting, and processing capabilities will allow to report disease outbreaks in real time. Studying reported diseases will help scientists in identifying patterns for disease suppression.

Patient data management and sharing

By the end of 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office has received notifications of over 350 data breaches, resulting in an exposure of 13,020,821 healthcare records.

HIPAA has strict regulations around the privacy of patient records. At the same time, those records cannot be isolated as there are several parties other than the patient and their physician who may need access for the sake of a patient’s wellbeing. At the same time, managing patient data using a traditional approach has been a complicated task, since this data is distributed over different healthcare databases that may be neither consistent nor interoperable.

Blockchain resolves those issues by offering a unified platform for storing and managing all relevant data in one location, while maintaining security and access control. Pieces of patient data are stored as blockchain blocks that are identifiable through the patient’s unique ID. This arrangement also allows sharing health information (blocks) without revealing the ID if the patient wishes to remain anonymous, for example, when participating in a clinical research.

With blockchain, it is possible for patients to allow their trusted care provider access to their medical information in an instant. This is particularly useful when dealing with elderly or unconscious patients. For example, the UK-based company Medicalchain allows patients to authorize access to their health information by scanning a censored bracelet using a smartphone.

Blockchain is also a reliable solution for population health data management. With the traditional system, information about every patient is distributed over multiple systems, which are not interoperable. This makes aggregating health data for a particular population cluster a challenging task. Blockchain offers a unified, secure platform for people to participate in population health studies as well as monetize the outcome of these studies. For example, the BaaS platform by AWS provides a robust and affordable solution for healthcare institutions that want to streamline patient records management.

Cryptocurrency payments

There are blockchain use cases in healthcare related to payment, too. For example, blockchain makes it possible to receive medical services and pay for them with cryptocurrency. One example is Solve.Care, a blockchain healthcare startup that partnered with Uber Health to facilitate patient transportation. Uber’s transportation services will be integrated into Solve.Care’s app, which will enable patients to schedule an Uber Health HIPAA-compliant ride and pay for the services using Care.Wallet.

Blockchain can facilitate health data monetization for people who are willing to share their genomic data for research purposes in return for a financial reward. Blockchain can then encapsulate their health information and facilitate transactions via cryptocurrency payments.

Micropayment is another concept enabled via blockchain. Micropayments are new value-based models in healthcare which reward patients if they follow their doctors’ instructions and stick to the prescribed lifestyles. Operating on a certain blockchain, this micropayment model will record every detail about the patient’s activities relevant to the treatment, review and track them back to the patient.

Medical staff credentialing

Verifying credentials is an important part of the hiring process. However, it can be a time-consuming and costly effort, mostly conducted by phone or mail. Blockchain is suited to replace this traditional process because blockchain records are verifiable, can be incrementally updated, and allowing full or limited permissions to view and update the entries.

The idea of using blockchain for medical staff credentialing is that all the relevant credentials can be inputted to a distributed ledger (a database) and accessed by those parties who entered a particular blockchain credentialing agreement. In this manner, when there is the need to access a candidate’s credentials (for example, over the period of 10 years), authorized parties can do it instantly within a single database without having to contact every institution where the credentials were obtained.

Hashed Health is the company that developed a blockchain-based credential verification system allowing physicians to prove that they are licensed professionals. This system offers an exchange platform for healthcare organizations that can access credentials of nurses, doctors, and other types of employees within the healthcare sector, as well as define particular rules and validation checks of credentials. Together with credentials, the blockchain stores professionals’ permissions to practice at particular levels and locations.