Healthcare Technology
& Innovation
64
These trends have become essential to deploying new solutions, such as blockchain, which promises to offer a fresh approach to interoperability. The unique properties of this technology provide an immutable and trusted workflow with a “single source of truth” to warrant integrity around health data exchange, minimize cybersecurity threats, and augment health data governance applications. At its core, blockchain offers the potential of a shared platform that could decentralize health data interactions while ensuring access control, authenticity, and integrity of protected health information exchange. Furthermore, successful deployment of blockchain on top of existing HIT systems (as an additional layer of trust and security) will minimize administration-related inefficiencies by replacing traditional trustee administrators or registry owners in the existing workflow of health data exchange.
GROWTH OPPORTUNITY 3:
Healthcare Consumerism and ‘Quantified-Self’:
The advent of digital health solutions is creating a plethora of personalized health and lifestyle data, manifesting a sense of healthcare consumerism. Today, consumers are more receptive to healthcare information, and they want to actively participate in healthcare at all levels of care. For example, a recent Frost & Sullivan survey revealed that about 69% of consumers in the United States track their health symptoms. Moreover, 41% will definitely change their physicians if they are not allowed to access their health records, and 74% of patients appreciate receiving customized alerts and news feeds post care. However, a majority of health consumers acknowledge that the existing patent engagement initiatives of major healthcare enterprises fail to effectively engage them during their experience in primary care.
They seldom receive access to personalized treatment options, referral support and adherence alerts outside physician offices in real time. This raises important questions around patient data ownership, access, and privacy issues with current HIT systems and emerging digital health solutions. Additionally, in this multilayered digital patient engagement space, interoperability and trusted workflows will be critical for future success.
Blockchain, as an open-sourced tool with peer-to-peer data-sharing networking models, provides identity management features with predefined user access rules to increase patients’ control over their health data and reliability for patient engagement initiatives. Further, permanent storage of encrypted patient-generated health data on immutable blockchain systems could provide a single, simplified view of patient data. This, in turn, empowers consumers to selectively share their anonymized personal health data for research, direct payment of incentive and health tokens toward positive and healthy behavior, and other adherence programs.