Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are used in a wide array of new applications – including in healthcare. Fintech start-ups are the catalyst for many of these recent market innovations – and they aren’t just focused on the banking and financial services sector. While finance is necessary for individuals and organisations of all sizes, both can struggle to access it. Yet recent advances in Fintech suggest this disparity can be addressed by capturing the market value of data and repurposing it as payable “currency”. This radically new decentralised finance (DeFi) concept is one that many, including healthcare administrators, are starting to take seriously.
With the COVID-19 pandemic showing how critical it is to have access to high-quality healthcare, and with access to it in some parts of the world falling short because of poverty and other factors, the likes of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) are currently exploring how the obstacles to healthcare access can be overcome in Dominique Vervoort et al’s BMJ Innovations article, “Blockchain, health disparities and global health”.
Vervoort and his co-authors Camila R Guetter and Alexander W Peters write: “Well being disparities stay huge around the globe and are perpetuated by error-prone data expertise methods, administrative inefficiencies and wasteful international well being spending. Blockchain expertise, a novel, distributed peer-to-peer ledger expertise, is more and more utilized in numerous industries to disintermediate, enhance effectivity and transparency and cut back prices; nevertheless, its use in healthcare and international well being has remained restricted.”
Of their article they argue that there are alternatives to leverage blockchain expertise “in international well being by way of cryptocurrencies and well being financing, provide chain administration, well being information, identification and verification, telehealth and misinformation.” They argue that or not it’s leveraged to assist mitigate the healthcare impression and disparities arising from the COVID-19 pandemic specifically.
Innovating healthcare
Dr. David Putrino and Dr. Jamie Wooden are well being expertise innovation consultants in one of many largest hospital methods in the US. They’re tasked with exploring rising applied sciences that can result in disruptive improvements in healthcare. In keeping with this imaginative and prescient, they’re collaborating with Decentr, an EU blockchain startup that’s making a digital foreign money backed by the worth of information saved of their ecosystem.
The purpose is to discover the event of a wide range of applied sciences together with Decentr’s personal pipeline; with every little thing from easy decentralised communication instruments, right through to re-imagined medical and analysis methods incorporating knowledge as worth. They embody platforms to allow sufferers to harness the worth of their anonymised knowledge, and extra simply contribute to large-scale medical trials, which are sometimes inaccessible to the vast majority of eligible individuals.
Dr. Putrino states: “Within the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, now we have seen an unprecedented surge in patient-led analysis, highlighting each the urge for food of sufferers to be extra actively concerned in medical analysis in addition to the worth of this strategy by way of fast discovery. Applied sciences developed inside the Decentr pipeline have the potential to empower thousands and thousands of sufferers who’re desperate to contribute their knowledge to medical trials. Equally, this will present alternatives for clinicians and researchers to utilise their very own knowledge worth and collaborations inside well being and science to leverage different streams of funding for ongoing analysis and growth.”
Nonetheless, knowledge safety might be an impediment. Wealthy James, CCO of Decentr, referring to GDPR and HIPAA, feedback:
“The healthcare trade has an issue with making certain well being data exchanges (HIE) are safe, environment friendly, and interoperable: blockchain expertise reveals nice promise to help with this. Utilizing blockchain-encoded medical information, sufferers will immediately have the ability to grant medical doctors entry to their complete life’s information from their very own Smartphone, thus eliminating the possibly life-threatening gaps of information that exist from one physician’s workplace to a different. Blockchain will open entry to knowledge for medical researchers and convey a couple of new period in AI-driven personalised drugs; this in flip will save on prices, considerably decreasing medical errors whereas resulting in unbelievable innovation within the house.”
Deloitte’s report, ‘Blockchain: Opportunities for health care: A new model for health information exchanges’ provides: “Blockchain expertise has the potential to remodel well being care, inserting the affected person on the centre of the healthcare ecosystem and rising the safety, privateness, and interoperability of well being knowledge.”
Knowledge to cut back prices
Decentr, in collaboration with Drs. Putrino and Wooden see this as the way forward for healthcare and goal to create a platform to securely retailer and share affected person knowledge on-chain, whereas extracting the market worth from this knowledge to offset the prices of healthcare suppliers’ medical and scientific analysis, and finally the price of affected person care.
Dr. Wooden says, “We have now lengthy been supporters of exploring methods to decentralise the sharing of scientific information, medical data and expertise, as we consider within the profound impression that it might have on healthcare and humanity.”
Dr. Wooden believes the best way data is shared, and the method by which sufferers and analysis individuals are included is considerably damaged and outdated. The prevailing applied sciences on the disposal of many well being methods don’t assist to resolve the problems they face. With this broader downside in thoughts, he turned to Decentr to understand his imaginative and prescient, which is partially consistent with the goal of closing the disparities in entry to healthcare.
Present applied sciences
James finds that present applied sciences don’t absolutely handle these necessities, as a result of they face limitations associated to safety, privateness, and full ecosystem interoperability. He claims these are all points Decentr addresses as a part of one system. He explains how this pertains to the work that Drs. Putrino and Wooden do:
“It’s encouraging to see that skilled healthcare leaders can see the potential in what we’re doing at Decentr, by way of safe, immutable end-to-end encrypted knowledge being made extra broadly accessible on-chain, which has the potential so as to add high quality to healthcare methods and enhance well being outcomes. The baseline challenge proper now – regardless of the obvious ubiquitous of expertise and the web – by way of communication and expertise methods in healthcare it’s nonetheless very troublesome, and by no means occurs, that medical workforce A in metropolis B, for instance, is aware of what medical workforce C is doing in metropolis D – even when they’re treating the identical trigger or situation and would invariably profit from the real-time change of knowledge.”
He says no broadly used data system exists to relay this data, arguing that to take action with the present infrastructure would create potential safety and privateness points. It’s due to this fact safer for practitioners to not trouble to share it, leaving them to proceed to work in isolation from each other. This requires the creation of a single, strong, and safe platform to encrypt affected person and different knowledge to make data extra accessible to analysis and affected person care.
Knowledge turns into foreign money
Drs. Putrino and Wooden are passionate concerning the potential of Decentr’s expertise to focus on among the causes of healthcare disparities. Within the conventional healthcare ecosystem, sufferers with complicated medical wants are sometimes considerably deprived in the case of entry to inexpensive care. Nonetheless, by turning private knowledge into one thing of worth, there may be potential to empower these sufferers to make use of their knowledge in a manner that immediately advantages them. This may create a really round knowledge economic system.
James explains that Drs. Putrino and Wooden had been interested in the concept as a result of they each consider that making knowledge a type of foreign money is “a key mechanism to equitably handle well being wants and extra broadly inefficiencies in each trade.”
Sadly, making folks wholesome is usually perceived as not being worthwhile inside the present international market and financial system that calls for ever-growing GDP. For instance this, James feedback that 10% of UK GDP in 2018 was for healthcare expenditure, which was up from 9.8% in 2017 whereas within the US in 2019 healthcare spending was up by 4.6%, reaching $3.8 trillion.
He argues that whereas the healthcare trade “continues to accrue as many inherently nugatory ‘third-party models of change’ (equivalent to Fiat currencies) as doable, it’s, paradoxically, to the good thing about a ‘wholesome’ economic system to verify all of us hold getting sicker. Nobody goes to surrender what’s successfully 17.7 % of the US GDP simply to make the inhabitants more healthy.”
Inexpensive analysis and care
James believes {that a} data-currency turns this “perverse observe” on its head by enhancing the safety, high quality and immutability of the information and the underlying system. In flip this may result in higher and simpler affected person therapies and outcomes that may contribute to this knowledge. This creates the chance to undertake and supply extra inexpensive analysis and care.
By making knowledge a foreign money, alternatives may even exist to encourage knowledge era, and make sure that the reuse and change of that knowledge will not be solely truthful and equitable however funded by a supply that’s a part of a real round economic system, and never an finish in and of itself. So, Fintech can meet and assist healthcare in some ways.
By Graham Jarvis, Freelance Enterprise and Know-how Journalist
