When exploring blockchain options, it can be beneficial to think of the challenges the technology can solve rather than the technology itself, as blockchain can be difficult to understand.
During a session at Becker's 5th Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference titled Current Trends in the Blockchain — Why it Just Makes Sense, panelists discussed how blockchain can be leveraged in healthcare. The session featured:
- John Paganini, CEO of IoT Directions.
- Ryan Wells, CEO of Health Here.
- Charles Aunger, management director of technology at Health2047.
Here are three takeaways:
1. In healthcare, departments work in a very siloed manner. This causes repeated tasks and verifications. It also can mean a lot of paper. If databases and content management platforms are developed on blockchain technology, codes could be sent between hospitals and pharmacies quickly to verify prescriptions.
2. Blockchain technology can be used to increase the performance of endpoints. By leveraging blockchain to analyze data type traffic on networks, organizations can increase the performance across clouds and create real-time routing and firewalls, improving endpoint performance by 350 percent.
3. Smart contracts, which are built on blockchain technology, are designed around prior authorization. If certain conditions are met, the contract will be completed automatically. Within healthcare, this can be used for claims management, speeding up the processes dramatically.