From Cracking Down the Counterfeit Drug Market to HIPAA Compliant Blockchain

As it seems, healthcare is all set to experience a massive revolution, all thanks to the blockchain technologies.

From streamlining the insurance and health records to cracking down the counterfeit drugs, governments and startups across the world are working to bring about a reform in the healthcare sector.

As we’ve seen, an Indian government think tank is working on developing a blockchain solution to fight the fake drugs supply within the country.

On the same lines, an announcement came from the two health insurance giants in the US that they are working on a blockchain pilot which aims to improve the quality of healthcare data.

Two largely rivals of the US healthcare industry, Humana and UnitedHealth Group are working together to develop a blockchain-powered solution. However, as of now, it is not clear as to what the project is all about and how it would revolutionise the healthcare. Further, even this is not clear if the pilot would enhance an existing platform or develop a new one right from scratch.

According to an official statement released by the company: “The pilot will examine how sharing data across healthcare organisations on blockchain technology can improve data accuracy, streamline administration and improve access to care.”

That’s not just it. Recently, a Delaware company, Embleema, introduced the beta version of their own HIPAA-compliant blockchain after a year of intensive research and development.

The platform is built on Ethereum and aims to connect life sciences, patients, and regulators and is developed with a sole aim of making the collection and sharing of RWE (real world evidence) easier.

Real world evidence or RWE covers the healthcare information assimilated from a range of sources including the data in the forms of billing and claims, electronic medical records, disease and product registries and so on.

RWE is essential to make important decisions related to accessing new medicines, providing reimbursements and so on. However, currently, RWE is suffering from a range of problems including low-quality data and the inability to monitor a patient for an extended period of time. Embleema aims to resolve such issues.

In addition to these, there is an array of companies that are trying to improve the EHRs (electronic health records) with the help of blockchain technologies.  Electronic health records, today, are struggling with various issues like security, interoperability, and accessibility.

This is where companies like Medibloc, Medicalchain, Medchain, Medichain, and Patientory aim to provide full access and control to the patients on their critical health information. Further, patients are even allowed to choose who to give the required access to let them view and edit their medical records.

These five startups are spread across the world. While Medibloc is based out of South Korea; Medicalchain and Medichain belong to the United Kingdom. On the other hand, Patientory and Medchain are found in the United States.

Thus, it is evident that blockchain technology is trying to improve and streamline the entire healthcare industry across the globe, on the whole. The reason that blockchain is decentralised and is an immutable ledger and keeps the patient’s sensitive data easily accessible, transparent and secure has made this technology popular.

It would be exciting to see how these startups continue revolutionising the industry.