Is Blockchain the Shot in the Arm Healthcare Needs?

Dr. Alex Cahana is head of healthcare and blockchain consulting at Genesis Block.

At the end of 2018, while awakening from the Crypto Winter, a group of noted healthcare professionals led by Mayo Clinic's John Halamka predicted that 2019 would be a pivotal year for blockchain in the healthcare industry.

These include the formation of major new business networks around healthcare use-cases, greater VC funding, and as already mentioned, the use of blockchain for credentialing.

Supply chain applications and physician credentialing are the most common use-cases in healthcare blockchain.

So what can we expect in 2020?As Nikhil Krishnan correctly predicted in his CB Insight report, the growing blockchain and healthcare landscape is currently dominated by closed consortia, where patient data is minimally used, under strict HIPPA or GDPR regulation.

Second, will we start to explain why we should use blockchain and stop just describing it? Yes, for blockchain to work it must be, as Toufi Saliba, CEO of the TODA Network says: SECSI. But doctors don't care that blockchain is a ledger and are not interested in explanations about PoS, PoW, sharding and DAGs.

Healthcare professionals need to understand that the "Secret sauce" behind using Blockchain in their practice is that their relationship with patients has an inherent value.

As healthcare remains the top issue on voters' minds this year, the country remains evenly split on whether we should have a very centralized system, a somewhat centralized one or state-based "Distributed" healthcare.

Nonetheless healthcare provides a very strong, if not perfect use-case for blockchain software solutions.

Finally, instead of pointing out what blockchain is missing, or fret that its purpose is unclear and changing, or hedge on what blockchain will become, let us state clearly what blockchain does.