Blockchain has the full potential to impact almost any industry it touches, despite the typical over-hype that follows such moves. According to Jake Meisenbach, who is a Senior Consultant at DMI, there is a great opportunity in applying blockchain to disrupt the healthcare sector.
Taking a closer look at how this technology can be leveraged and its pitfalls creates an amazing possibility to transform the old and rigid healthcare industry and turn it into one of the most secure data-driven sectors.
Since its inception in 2008 with Bitcoin, blockchain has drawn a lot of attention from investors and enthusiasts alike. According to Juniper Research’s July 2017 report, 67% of enterprises had spent more than $100 000 by the end of 2016 and 91% planned to spend more than that in 2017 for the deployment of blockchain technology.
The potential for trust-building, through the native functionalities of the technology is what makes it applicable to a plethora of sectors – from financial through, legal, logistics and especially healthcare.
In comparison with other industries, where blockchain creates efficiencies in process management, removes middlemen and provides methods of verification every step of the way, the potential for disruption in healthcare is even greater.
Apart from the obvious application in the financial/transaction side of the industry (which is a given), there is great potential in achieving medical breakthroughs through the use of patients data, in addition to the detection and prevention of counterfeit drug distribution.
Being able to collect, store and analyse medical data on a large scale, is a great opportunity for the creation of predictive models, healthcare advancements and improved accuracy in diagnosing patients.
The best thing about it is that blockchain allows this data to be permanently stored on it, without significant risks of tampering and theft, while access can be managed by the data’s owner (the patient) and given only to those trusted and engaging with them.
Considering the above it won’t be a surprise to see healthcare organizations following the example of the financial and logistical sectors in deploying blockchain projects on both small and large scale. This is far from just pure speculation, as pointed out in a recent IDC Health Insights report, which forecasts that 1-in-5 healthcare organisations will adopt blockchain by 2020.
We took a closer look at the progress of a few of the top blockchain projects in the healthcare sector and after analyzing the data, these forecasts might just be right on track. The projects we examined were MediBloc, which aims at democratizing healthcare records and data,
Dentacoin, which aims at shifting the paradigm from “sick care” and “drill & fill” mentality to patient-centered preventive dentistry, as well as Medicalchain, that enables secure, fast and transparent exchange and usage of medical data and improve telemedicine.
Altogether the three projects have more than 200 organizations in their partner networks, with thousands of healthcare professionals from various fields – from dentistry through cosmetic surgery to general and specialised medicine.
Now even though this number does not seem very close to the 20% forecasts, it is wise to keep in mind that all of these projects have just stepped out of early development and started approaching potential healthcare organizations as partners recently (roughly less than a year ago) and crypto’s typical snowball effect might just make the difference.
Snowball, or not, we saw how committed the teams are, so even if these forecasts fall short, the future of blockchain healthcare is indeed bright.
