Empowering Healthcare Innovation Through (Rather On)
Healthcare as a service has always been unique in its ability to directly impact people.
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Updated November 2026. This was first published on 16 December 2022. The idea is the same. Any number below is what the original piece said then. It is not a new count.
Key takeaways
- Healthcare as a service has always been unique in its ability to directly impact people.
- They are lasting and can directly change the course of someone’s life.
- This has always left a lasting challenge for advancement as immense time has always been traditionally required to ensure maximum safety and treatment effect.
The Focus for Innovation in Healthcare Has to Extend Beyond the Patient #
Healthcare as a service has always been unique in its ability to directly impact people. They are lasting and can directly change the course of someone’s life. This has always left a lasting challenge for advancement as immense time has always been traditionally required to ensure maximum safety and treatment effect. These proven methods have been backed by almost half a century of innovation methodology that has delivered widely successful therapeutics from the lab into the bedside for patients. Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic allowed for the adoption of technologies that model and virtually test biological environments to develop vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments in record time.
Technology has allowed for innovation in the paradigm of treatment development and care optimization. is the greatest proportion of services being innovated on within the healthcare sector. But what cannot be ignored, and where new efforts are necessary, are innovating in paradigms that allow for this care to be provided. Healthcare spending has increased considerably in the last few years, with the notable exception of 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when costs dramatically decreased due to a shift of focus onto a few essential services. The United States has spent over $3.8 trillion in 2019 with 31% of claimed expenditures being made by hospitals alone. While healthcare service costs make up a large size of this spending, rising costs are not solely due to remuneration for more complex services or the cost of novel therapeutics. Rather a continually growing proportion is due to a lack of scalable and secure logistical and technological infrastructure that has been forced to continue bearing the weight of new iterations of technologies that aim to better patient outcomes and care efficiency.
A key example is electronic medical records, as their setup has allowed for ubiquitous and easy access of metrics to both the physician and more recently the patient (as legislation passed has allowed patients access to all their medical records, including patients’ notes and communications between physicians within the charts regarding the patient). Yet security protocols did not develop at the same pace as this digitization – leaving continuous holes in security that have resulted in very substantial losses of finances for systems through data breaches. Examples include Scripps Health, a nonprofit healthcare provider that experienced an attack in May of 2021, resulting in an expected loss of $106.8 million through ransomware attacks that have stalled efficiencies, revenue flow, and costs to repair the damage. The growing complexity of technologies for use by providers and patients will also remain attractive to hospital systems whose primary aim is to better the quality of care. the quality of the systems that power these tools but also proportionally be innovated in and adopted.
Given the many roads and many problems that are continuing to rise in the current healthcare landscape, what then are the areas to focus on? A common question for adopters of innovations within all areas of healthcare, especially due to its direct impact on the patient, is can this setup be trusted. While most of the focus is on therapeutics, these questions are also routinely being asked about the data that is being used as the basis for making changes in the healthcare setting such as optimizing protocols or implementing new technology. These conversations have even become ubiquitous in the public, with data security becoming of the primary zeitgeists of concern in recent years. Luckily, technologies that help to answer these questions with trusting confidence exist and are poised to start revolutionizing healthcare.
Can Automating Trust & Security be Viable in Healthcare #
The ubiquity of blockchain applications is just now starting to become mainstream. Platforms developed on the ethos of decentralized finance have provided any class of user access to the tools they need to participate in legitimate investment opportunities to grow their wealth. While subsequent applications in the non-fungible token space have opened doors to a variety of virtually owned content that can be trusted to have a legitimate value. Technology like the Ethereum blockchain and polygon network have allowed platforms for new technologies to be created on them with the drive for allowing storage of value that is – colloquially referred to as – immutable. While the last decade may appear to be a long time to have these technologies to begin to enter the mainstream, these technologies have been adopted faster than prior innovations of this scale. Adaptations of this technology in finance have been the largest proportion of new solutions to appear in recent years. the ubiquity of applications can extend far beyond. The reason is that decentralization, allowed for by the setup of blockchain-based technology, has automated trust and the foundation of every system that we participate in requires some form of trust for it to function.
With the ubiquity of healthcare data being generated every day, from users’ own biofeedback metrics such as the apple watch to at-home blood tests and glucose measurements and new metrics being generated and stored in the hospital – the cost for security and maintenance of this data has also increased. What is being paid for is simply the means to trust that this data is remaining privy only to those that can have access to it. what if all this can be automated. What if there does not need to be a single source to house and secure this data, to protect it from invasion while simultaneously empowering patients to take care of their own data? Thereby eliminating the centralization of this data, and the costs both real and potential that a hospital system can occur.
How can Implementing Blockchains Help Then? #
The setup of blockchains in securing healthcare data has become a considerable starting point for developers. But not only is development being done on blockchains to secure patients who are actively receiving care. optimization in the research sphere has also gained steam. Examples include the Canada University Health Network (UHN) which has developed a patient-centered blockchain that functions to allow for proper patient consent for research and storage of subsequent intake and result data on their blockchain, expediting clinical research progress and preventing concerns that results could be tainted by poor data. Iterations of electronic medical records that are being developed on a blockchain-based system and are amenable to tokenization with patients become nodes in affirming the patient data in the blockchain have had patents recently accepted to the United States patent system.
The main theme among these new rising technologies is the decentralization of the storage of data. Blockchain-based technologies generate economies that inherently prevent the burden of the cost of securing the data onto one sole party. If hospital systems, for example, can have access to scalable blockchain-based platforms to secure their data – then the threat of breaches, the infrastructure needed to deliver the data securely, and maintenance of a centralized system would be most likely eliminated. Such areas, while not affecting the patient directly, can help drastically increase resource utilization for bettering patient care, healthcare access, and staff satisfaction.
The focus on lowering healthcare costs and bettering patient outcomes has led to a large focus on findings new ways to better deliver tools and therapeutics to patients. Yet constant setup of these technologies and methods is being done on an infrastructure that is not experiencing innovation at the same pace over numerous paradigms. setup of blockchain technologies has the potential to help alleviate these issues, accelerating innovation in the back end to lower costs while also bettering patient and provider satisfaction.
Questions and answers #
What is the main point? #
Healthcare as a service has always been unique in its ability to directly impact people.
What else did the original piece say? #
They are lasting and can directly change the course of someone’s life.