Is Healthcare today ready to address the needs of modern patients? Over the last few years, the power of data has made industries tweak their existing business models and, in some cases, pushed to create new models altogether. While most industries are moving ahead by leveraging data, a few seem to be moving slowly. Healthcare is one among them. Due to varying formats and standards, patient data lurking in legacy systems is often siloed and challenging to monetize. Patients, too, are not incentivized to store their health records. Overlooking Healthcare data by both parties, i.e. industry and Users, is negatively impacting the Healthcare system and containing the industry’s progress. Even if the ecosystem – Hospitals, Pharma, Insurer, Regulators, Patients – intends to address this problem, it is struggling to find a suitable economic model to embrace. This write-up helps understand what Blockchain says about monetizing health records and solving the ecosystem’s inertia.
Electronic Health Record (EHR) on Blockchain
Practitioners often rely on medical tests for diagnosis and prescribe a suitable treatment plan. Unfortunately, the medical reports are not shared across the ecosystem but siloed in an organization or a diagnostic centre that has done the test. This causes fragmentation of health records leading to redundant, incorrect or inefficient diagnosis. This leads to inconsistent medical history from the Patient’s standpoint. Research at the American John Hopkins Hospital concluded that medical errors form a sizable percentage of deaths every year and most of them are due to inconsistency in health records leading to improper diagnosis. Blockchain allows the Healthcare ecosystem to communicate among themselves about the patients’ data with ease. When an authorized actor in the ecosystem updates a patient health record, the system updates the record on Blockchain. Any actor with authorized access to that record can see and update it in real-time. As the healthcare records are updated in the Blockchain by all authorized parties, the issue of inconsistency, incorrectness and inefficiency is addressed to a large extent, if not entirely. The entire application can be made available on a web-top for the ecosystem to leverage, with suitable checks and measures in place. Because of the data availability across the ecosystem, actors like Insurers, per se, can incentivize the patients by customizing premiums based on Patient’s health data.
How does it work?
§ Data standard and structure of the information published on Blockchain is defined
§ Actors in the ecosystem capture data and make it available on Blockchain
§ Patient grants access to EHR to the Practitioner
§ Practitioner’s ID is added to the Patient’s authorized asset on the ledger
§ Patient’s ID is added to the Practitioner’s official asset on the ledger
§ The symmetric key for EHR is decrypted with the Patient’s private key
§ Symmetric key is then encrypted with Practitioner’s public key
Many companies like Fitbit, Apple, and Nest embrace the healthcare data currently submitted by users and attempt to build business models around it using existing technologies. However, the impact is substantial when widespread across the ecosystem, creating a win-win for all actors. Existing technologies have limitations to operate in the regulated ecosystem. This is where Blockchain, with its promising features, seem to be a good fit. If the economic model built around is actionable and strikes the right chords, it can potentially change the landscape of the Healthcare industry altogether.
The views expressed above are purely personal.