For example, some organizations are beginning to use blockchain to apply advanced analytics from distributed sources without compromising the privacy of individuals.

We are now seeing a rapid expansion of blockchain-based technology offerings, many of them in the Healthcare and Pharma/Biotech spaces. A November 2017 article in Forbes, This Is Why Blockchains Will Transform Healthcare, considered some of the latest developments. Though still in the early days and, despite an enormous amount of interest, most of these value propositions remain little more than prototypes. However, the rate of evolution is surprisingly fast, and the time is right to review some of the emerging use cases and consider where things may lead.

First, what is blockchain? In a nutshell, it is a log of transactions that is replicated and distributed across multiple decentralized locations: As such, it offers a secure, high integrity, “neutral” 3rd party mechanism for knowing what data is where and precisely how it is changing over time. Blockchain is not a magic bullet that solves all data management problems but few areas of data sharing cry out more for improvements in efficiency and security than the data domains of Healthcare and Pharma/Biotech.

Blockchain in Healthcare

There are many use cases being explored in Healthcare but let’s narrow our gaze on a few of the most promising:

Health Records

Creating usable, high integrity records associated with a patient despite their moving through different healthcare domains and systems is one of the great challenges of healthcare IT. Blockchain offers the possibility of creating a reliable place to track the changes across systems in a manner that gets around many of the concerns associated with data integration between proprietary systems. In effect, blockchain becomes the unifying glue that holds together a highly fragmented healthcare record.

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