SANTA CLARA, California – In the next five to 10 years, a blockchain ecosystem with healthcare-focused use cases involving health data exchanges, smart assets management, insurance and payment solutions, blockchain platform providers, and consortiums will emerge. Ongoing digital democratization of care delivery models towards a much-anticipated personalized and outcome-based treatment paradigm will be the major impetus for blockchain adoption.
Furthermore, the convergence of blockchain with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, mHealth and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) provides new opportunities to explore digital health economies. At its core, blockchain would offer the potential of a shared platform that decentralizes healthcare interactions ensuring access control, authenticity, and integrity while presenting the industry with radical possibilities for value-based care and reimbursement models.
“Burgeoning connected health devices and the need to protect against data breaches make blockchain, with its ubiquitous security infrastructure, the obvious foundation for emerging digital health workflows and advanced healthcare interoperability. It creates an additional trust layer through unique distributed network consensus that uses cryptography techniques to minimize cyber threats,” said Transformational Health Industry analyst Kamaljit Behera. “Blockchain technology may not be the panacea for healthcare industry challenges needs but it holds the potential to save billions of dollars by optimizing current workflows and disintermediating some high-cost gatekeepers.”
"The healthcare industry needs to establish blockchain consortia to facilitate partnerships and create standards for future implementation on a large scale across healthcare use cases," observed Behera. "A blockchain-based system will enable unprecedented collaboration, bolstering innovation in medical research and the execution of larger healthcare concepts such as precision medicine and population health management. In IoMT, it can settle security, privacy and reliability concerns to allow integration of health data from Internet of Medical Things (IoT) or medical devices for remote and autonomous monitoring. In the pharmaceutical industry, the technology can potentially save $200 billion by inhibiting counterfeit and substandard drugs."
Blockchain Technology in Global Healthcare, 2017–2025, new research from Frost & Sullivan's Advanced Medical Technologies Growth Partnership Service program, examines blockchain potential to resolve concerns around data interoperability, cybersecurity, insurance notarization and medical billing frauds, integrity around clinical trials, and drug supply chain provenance. Along with adoption timelines, the study looks at growth opportunities, implementation challenges, government and commercial initiatives, select collaborations and deals, and companies/consortia to watch. — SG
