Health and Blockchain: Today and Into The Future

Health and Blockchain: Today and Into The Future

In our research, we have passion for improving health care, and we believe we can build more trusted health care systems using cryptography and data science.

For nearly a decade we have strived to build systems which were citizen-focused, and our spin-out company — Symphonic — was built on supporting the sharing of data within health and social care in a trusted manner. With this we created new health care models where citizens actually owned their own data, and had rights to share it with others. And so now — supported by many partnerships in our Blockpass ID Lab — we aim to build more trusted systems and which respect the rights of the citizen to privacy and consent. For us cryptography will build the foundation layer of our future health care system, and where digital signing becomes a core part of our world.

But we can all look to the research horizon, and try and predict the future, but what’s the near horizon? Well, with a range of researcher from around the world, we have tried to look at the near future of healthcare and blockchain [here]:

Within it we have defined the 10 major themes for the future of blockchain in healthcare over the next year are:

• Blockchain will become an essential part of consent management.
• Remittance and micropayments will increasingly migrate to blockchain.
• Non-cash assets including outcomes will be tokenized.
• Providers will be credentialed on chain.
• Improvements to blockchain infrastructure will reduce electricity requirements and enhance speed/scalability.
• Supply chain integrity will be tracked on chain.
• Education of stakeholders will refine the use cases for blockchain and accelerate adoption
• Opportunities for monetization of data including the genome will be enhanced by blockchain.
• Integrity of medical records will be an essential use case for blockchain.
• Existing blockchain in healthcare startups will be acquired and we’ll see substantial consolidation of blockchain in healthcare offerings.

We built the Internet in the 1980s, and much of our digital world still uses the methods that were created then. This world is almost completed without any real trust. We now need to build a new world, and this time it will be one which truly integrates the rights of individuals to privacy, consent, and governance of their data.

Data should be used to improve the lives of our citizens, and not to spy on them. Governments around the world need to use data in a way which can build new ways to care and transact, and move away from our silo’ed world.