From the January/February 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Payment and claims
While it’s important to recognize that blockchain will not be a solution to all problems in health care, it holds tremendous promise when there are many transactions with a multitude of involved entities, where each transaction or interface between entities must abide by certain policy or predefined rules. An example is the general area of payments in health care and related issues such as preauthorization, and bundle-based payment methods.
For example, in bundle payments, tracking the various services provided, their costs, their associated outcomes and mapping them to the specifications of the bundle are critical for timely adjudication of the bundle. Blockchain could play a key role because it creates visibility and an audit trail on what has happened, by whom and to what outcome.
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At IBM Watson Health, we’ve been working and experimenting with various blockchain-based smart contract implementations that help with capturing all kinds of important patient information like medication adherence, tracking benefits eligibility or capturing patient outcomes for enabling value-based care models. Smart contracts enable automation of business processes that transcend organizational boundaries in a secure and decentralized manner, and enable a better network, when multiple people and factors are contributing, yet all must be tracked appropriately.
Clinical trial results
Another area where there are numerous collaborators, contributing factors and a lot of accompanying paperwork is during clinical trials. As pharmaceutical companies advance treatment candidates to later stage clinical trials, they must prepare a dossier for review by federal regulators, like the Food and Drug Administration.
Once a pharma company comes up with the treatment-testing protocol, it, or a contract research organization, must recruit sites with principal investigators (doctors) to conduct a portion of that trial. After recruiting trial participants, the investigators must conduct the protocol by collecting enormous amounts of data on multiple subjects – often daily – to test the treatment. This process, as many physicians already know, can be ripe for introducing errors and/or duplicate records – something that can be potentially very damaging for the trial drug’s final submission to regulators.
With blockchain as the backbone for tracking all of this information, you don’t have to wait three to four months to collect, process and review all of the research. The secure, decentralized framework blockchain provides allows you to have instant and clear visibility into the data, seriously reducing errors and duplication. This has the potential to speed the time and potentially lower the cost of bringing new treatments and diagnostic capabilities to market.
