Empowering Healthcare Innovation Through the Blockchain
Healthcare as a service has always been unique in its ability to directly impact patients.
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Updated November 2026. This was first published on 3 December 2021. 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 patients.
- They are lasting and can directly change the course of patients?
- This has always left a challenge for advancement as immense time is traditionally required to ensure maximum safety and treatment efficacy.
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 patients. They are lasting and can directly change the course of patients? This has always left a challenge for advancement as immense time is traditionally required to ensure maximum safety and treatment efficacy. These proven methods have been backed by almost half a century of innovation methodology that has delivered widely successful therapeutics from the labs into patients? Yet, the recent pandemic allowed for the adoption of technologies that model and virtually test 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 the healthcare sector due to its direct impact on patients. 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 where 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 increased compensation or the cost of therapeutics. A continually growing proportion is due to a lack of scalable and secure logistical and technological infrastructure that has been forced to continue to bear the increasing weight of new technologies that better patient outcomes and care efficiency.
A key example is electronic medical records (EMR), as their setup has allowed for ubiquitous and easy access of metrics to both the physician and more recently the patient. Yet the security protocols did not develop at the same pace as use increased ? leaving continuous holes in security that have resulted in very substantial losses of finances for systems through data breaches. Recent examples included 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 always remain attractive to hospital systems whose primary aim is to better the quality of care. the quality of the systems that power these tools needs to also proportionally be innovated in and adopted.
Given the many roads and problems that have arisen in the current healthcare landscape, what then are the areas to focus on? While most of the focus is on therapeutics, the paradigm of healthcare data has become 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 general public, with the advent of data security becoming a primary concern for patients. Luckily, technologies to inherently solve these worries have already been around for a decade.
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 ? While the last decade may appear to be a long time to have these technologies begin to enter the mainstream, these technologies have been adopted faster than prior innovations of this scale. Adaptations of these technologies in finance have been the largest proportion of new innovations to appear in recent years. this is of course just the beginning. The reason for this optimism is that decentralization, allowed for by the setup of blockchain-based technology, has automated trust. Yet the foundation of every system that we participate in requires some form of trust for it to function.
With the amount of healthcare data being generated every day 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 incur.
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-centred 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 based on a blockchain system that is amenable to tokenization with patients becoming nodes in affirming the patient data in the blockchain have had patents recently accepted to the United States patent service.
The main theme among these new rising technologies is the decentralization of the storage of the 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 too 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.
Conclusion #
The focus on lowering healthcare costs and bettering patient outcomes has led to a large focus on findings ways to better deliver and tools and therapeutics to patients. Yet constant setup of these technologies and methods that are between the provider and patient level is being done on top of an infrastructure that is not being innovated at the same pace over numerous paradigms. Implementations of blockchain technologies have the potential to help alleviate these issues, accelerating innovation in the back end to lower costs while also bettering patient, provider, and staff satisfaction.
Questions and answers #
What is the main point? #
Healthcare as a service has always been unique in its ability to directly impact patients.
What else did the original piece say? #
They are lasting and can directly change the course of patients?