Blockchain in Healthcare // National Health IT Week Roundtable

On Thursday September 29 at 1pm ET I will be hosting a conversation on blockchain in healthcare. Please join us live or catch the replay right here. My guests will be Brian Ahier (@ahier), Leonard Kish (@leonardkish) and Peter Nichol (@PeterBNichol). As we observe National Health IT Week, we take a multifaceted look at the technology and its potential for improving health IT. We welcome your comments and questions.

Update: More information added below the embedded video.

My guests were kind enough to indulge me in some explanations of blockchain, but also observed, in essence, that you don’t really need to understand how an internal combustion engine works on order to reap the benefits of driving a car.

We discussed the range of possible applications, from research to medication reconciliation and beyond, the likely timelines for adoption, the varied approaches to implementation (permissioned vs. permissionless, for example), and more.

Here are links to some further explanation and discussion:

Peter Nichol:

If I Only Had Five Minutes to Explain Blockchain

The ONC Blockchain Challenge and the birth of the Crypto-Citizen for Healthcare

Leonard Kish:

Rewriting Healthcare on the Blockchain

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Blockchain

Unpatients – Why patients should own their own medical data (I have a different perspective on data ownership; see my post, and Leonard’s comment, among others, here.)

Youbase integration with Self Care Catalyst (video)

Other:

Evaluating Blockchain for Health Information Exchange (John Halamka’s blog, with comment from Arien Malec and David McCallie)

ONC and HHS blockchain challenge finalists (Announced about a month ago; descriptions and links to the fifteen papers included)

Deloitte page about blockchain and their challenge submission

David Harlow
The Harlow Group LLC
Health Care Law and Consulting