F007 The hype and the hope: blockchain in healthcare?

Blockchain technology has already disrupted the Fintech industry. When will we see implemented use cases in healthcare, one of the most regulated sectors?

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Practical use of blockchain in healthcare was one of the topics at the Future for health (www.ftr4h.org) conference during the SXSW Festival 2018.

Moderated by me as the FTR4H Ambassador and the business developer at the blockchain healthcare startup Iryo, three speakers shared their knowledge in the panel titled “The hype and the hope: How much can blockchain really solve in healthcare?”. We talked about new ideas around healthcare delivery popping up due to the potentials of blockchain.

The speakers were:

Michael Dillhyon, a serial entrepreneur. One of the last companies he founded is Healthbank — a Swiss based organization building the world’s first people-owned health data transaction platform. He shared his knowledge on the value of health data and the question how to define value of health data and prices of it.

Samson Williams is a Partner at Axes and Eggs cryptocurrency mining company and blockchain consultancy and also a Board Member of the DC Department of Health. He mentioned identity verification as one of the key disrupting features of blockchain for healthcare as it opened up the question “why don’t we own our medical data?”. Samson also shared his view on the potential of blockchain in medical research and the future of token economy in the healthcare space.

Eugene Borukhovich currently serves as a Global Head of Digital Health Innovation at Bayer. He was asked about how the digital health industry sees the rise of blockchain and patient data questions, is Pharma already using blockchain in clinical trials or for tracking the origin of the production of drugs, to prevent counterfeit medicine entering the market.

All the panelists agreed the technology is not the problem, the key questions that are going to be decisive for implementation and adoption of blockchain solutions are regulation and policy.

The full panel is available as the 7th episode of the Faces of digital health podcast:

To learn more about blockchain in healthcare, listen to other episodes of this podcast. Two episodes were recorded last year, when the show was still named Medicine Today on digital health.

Episode 14 talks about the basics of blockchain and it’s capabilities in healthcare.

Episode 23 is addressing the issue around the connection between interoperability in healthcare and blockchain.