As care for lifestyle-driven chronic diseases expands in scope, prevention and recovery are becoming the new focus areas, apart from diagnosis and treatment. Medical experts agree that most chronic health conditions are largely preventable by employing sustainable behavior modification and wellness programs around healthy food habits attuned to individuals at risk of developing these chronic diseases. Precision medicine promises a paradigm shift in the care delivery arena. It aims to integrate personalized health data both from direct (quantifiable) and indirect (quantifiable) sources probing the deepest mysteries affecting individual health and wellbeing. However, precision medicine practice is not unique to some of the prevailing challenges involving health data interoperability, privacy, and ownership. Regardless of the ongoing digital initiatives, current limitations around security, integrity, and access control for personalized health data are creating critical bottlenecks for precision medicine practice. Today, digital health workflows are inefficient with acute data silos among different providers, hospitals, and payers, and even various departments within a health system, impeding care coordination. As the healthcare industry struggles to find the trade-off between risk and reward of going digital, potential application of blockchain technology provides a timely answer to mitigate some of these pressing needs. 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.
This Frost Prospective explores how blockchain technology could provide an additional layer of trust and security to potentially eliminate the inherent challenges for precision medicine practice, such as health data interoperability, cybersecurity, data ownership, and value-based care. It also provides an overview on blockchain technology and its foundational properties with a differential value proposition to address some of the pressing needs for precision medicine practice. Differentiating the hype from reality, this Frost Prospective lists the most promising use cases of blockchain technology in the healthcare realm, such as digital identity management, claims adjudication and billing management, and drug supply chain integrity. Finally, it discusses some of the key challenges around blockchain implementation and proposes a framework model that would help healthcare industry stakeholders identify the most relevant blockchain use cases and strategic imperatives for successful implementation.
Key Questions this Frost Prospective will Answer:
- What is blockchain technology and what is its implication for the healthcare industry?
- What is the role of blockchain in addressing some of the inherent challenges for precision medicine practice?
- What are the most promising application areas of blockchain in the healthcare industry?
- What are the challenges for implementing blockchain in the healthcare space?
- What is the role of blockchain in the future of the connected health ecosystem?
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