Blockchain—A New Model for Health Information Exchanges

To access a copy of Deloitte's award winning Blockchain: Opportunities for Healthcare white paper, click here.

Blockchain technology has the potential to transform healthcare, placing the patient at the center of the healthcare ecosystem and increasing the security, privacy, and interoperability of health data.

Blockchain refers to an innovative ledger and transaction recording technology that allows an immutable, shared, and distributed digital record of medical transactions. In so doing, blockchain diminishes information asymmetries and removes barriers to efficient collaboration in health care. The technology first emerged as an enabler to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin; however, its application has expanded from payments and financial services to other industries and has attracted over $1.1 Billion of investment.

In healthcare, established organizations and startups alike are already experimenting with blockchain enabled smart contracts that execute against distributed medical records, pharmaceutical tracking and anti-counterfeiting, and medical identity technology. Innovative blockchain powered solutions are possible in automated claims processing, loyalty and incentivized behavior modification.

For the broader health care ecosystem, this technology could provide a new model for Health Information Exchanges (HIE), which today face challenges to realizing their full potential. The current state of exchanging and acting on information from health care records, or healthcare interoperability, is disjointed and stovepiped due to a lack of common architectures and standards that would allow the safe transfer of sensitive information among stakeholders in the system. Blockchain could address several existing pain points and enable a system that is more efficient, disintermediated, and secure:

We believe Blockchain could unlock unique opportunities to reduce complexity, enable trustless collaboration, and create secure and immutable records. This rapidly evolving field provides fertile ground for experimentation, investment, and proof-of-concept testing; however, it is not a panacea. Many questions remain, such as potential scalability constraints, uncertainties related to data standardization and scope, incentives and other requirements needed for adoption, cost, and regulatory considerations. 

Despite unanswered questions, the opportunities in healthcare presented by blockchain technology are promising. Our approach to activating the blockchain potential in healthcare involves generating, testing and scaling blockchain use cases in healthcare. We are not alone in this effort. We have built an ecosystem of collaborators – start-ups, academic institutions, established healthcare players and new entrants to test and validate claims made by evangelists of the technology.

Our upcoming Life Sciences and Healthcare Blockchain Workshop, hosted in collaboration with the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, will connect leading health care providers, health plans, medical device companies, and regulators with cutting edge technologists and innovative ideas. Our latest point of view is available in the newly published, award winning Blockchain: Opportunities for Healthcare white paper.

The promise of blockchain has widespread implications for stakeholders in the health care ecosystem. Capitalizing on this technology has the potential to connect fragmented systems to generate insights and to better assess the value of care. In the long term, a nationwide blockchain network for electronic medical records may improve efficiencies and support better health outcomes for patients.