The hype surrounding blockchain has died and companies and coins have endured a long winter of discontent wherein the weak-willed and ill-managed have starved and died. This isn’t really news. Anyone paying even half-assed attention in the earliest months of 2018 could see it coming: like starving animals enduring a long and hard winter without an accessible food source, companies without a clear direction were going to shrivel and die.
The technology never lost its ability to disrupt, though. Instead, we lost the narrative somewhere in the hype.
So clearing away the hype for a moment—where is this technology best suited?
Anywhere substantial risk to life and limb or liberty hinges on details that get frequently lost in the minutiae.
Like healthcare.
Let’s consider that medicare fraud caused more than $30 million in losses in the United States in 2016. Blockchain-based systems could mitigate that through more transparent, immutable record-keeping. Admin costs for bulling could be reduced by replacing middle-men with automated activities.
There’s also the implications for drug development.
Blockchains could make patient results more widely accessible, and reduce the counterfeit drug implications that currently cost pharmaceutical companies upwards to $200 billion in losses annually.
The list of issues within the industry isn’t exhaustive, either.
Some of the current challenges within modern healthcare industry include:
- Drug traceability
- Poor healthcare data management
- Data security in clinical trials
- Medical device tracking
- Patient records
- Overdiagnosis
Here are two companies using blockchain technology, and what they’re doing to help:
Vitalhub (VHI.V)
VHI is a Toronto-based tech company offering blockchain-based solutions to the healthcare industry. Their products include TREAT and MCAP. The first working to streamline patient data and the latter hard at work on hospital patient flow problems.
Normally patient records are found in disparate locations, and usually in complete disarray. Charts can disappear. They can be marked up and rendered illegible. Files can be corrupted if digitized. Sometimes vital information gets lost in the shuffle, which can be a dangerous mistake.
- From vitalhub’s investor deck
TREAT fixes all that by putting all of that information on one blockchain-enabled application. TREAT is a web-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) and care coordination platform designed for providers of behavioural health and community based services.
MCAP, an acronym for Making Care Appropriate for Patients, is another blockchain-enabled platform, acquired through their subsidiary The Oak Group. It deals with patient flows, which is exactly what it sounds like: the steady stream of flow of beds, patients and rooms, which is one of the principle sources of aggravation for admitting nurses.
One of the major consequences of inadequate patient flow is the development of queues.
According to Analytics Magazine, there are three major causes of queues in hospitals:
- Idle capacity due to a failure to synchronize complementary resources. For example, making sure there’s an X-ray tech present on the day when a patient needs an X-ray.
- Inadequate communication to ensure downstream departments are prepared to receive patients from upstream departments and to ensure that all parties are prepared for foreseeable demand. For example: No patients left waiting in the hallway for hours because their rooms aren’t ready, because someone failed to inform housekeeping that the previous patient had been discharged.
- Inefficient processes that require more work than necessary or un-needed repetition of work. For example, nurses who spend time gathering together medication for their patients and then discover that the nurse they took over for has already given them their medication and failed to mark that on the chart.
MCAP is designed to ease this variety of problem by cutting down the waiting time created by excess paperwork.
MTBC (MTBC.Q)
There are alternative logistical challenges within the healthcare system that have since gone unrecognized. For example, patient data flows, which are commonly found on paper charts and isolated applications on individual machines (like iPAD’s), aren’t subject to transportation over large geographies.
If you’re on vacation in Seattle and you get into a car accident, the doctor won’t have access to your patient records from Edmonton, and if they do they won’t be able to access is because of privacy concerns. MTBC aims to change that. If both hospitals are using the same system, then the patient could simply acknowledge that he or she would like to share his information, and grant the hospital access to his or her records on MTBC’s permissioned blockchain.
- Source: MBTC’s investor deck.
Patient’s control access to their records via their EHRs mobile app, and can grant permission to any provider whose EHR joins the network. The network allows providers to then synchronize data on that patient securely over blockchain to all connected EHR records they’ve been given permission to, while data is traditionally stored on their associated EHRs database. The network is open for any EHR to join through MTBC.
—Joseph Morton