Blockchain Technology in Global Healthcare, 2017–2025

Blockchain technology, with its ubiquitous security infrastructure for seamless health data exchange, holds potential to eliminate the burden and cost of health data reconciliation and facilitate interoperability. Emerging blockchain systems promise to unlock new economic advantages by disintermediating high-cost gatekeepers and automating transactional services across healthcare workflows (e.g., claim adjudication, billing management, RCM, drug supply chain).

Increasing pricing pressure to decrease healthcare cost globally and digitization of care delivery models are transitioning the industry toward a much-anticipated personalized treatment paradigm. With these health systems, payers and drug and device manufacturers equally urgently require a secure connected health IT ecosystem to manage healthcare data and promote value-based care.

At its core, blockchain offers the potential of a shared platform that decentralizes health data, ensuring access control, authenticity, and integrity of protected health information. Further, the blockchain-based distributed network consensus with cryptography techniques provides an additional layer of trust to minimize cybersecurity threats for healthcare IT systems. This never-before blockchain-based trusted workflow with a “single source of truth” presents the healthcare industry with radical new possibilities for outcome-based care delivery and reimbursement models.

Despite the hype around blockchain, for many people (across different industries), the blockchain concept remains difficult to grasp—which makes it one of the most misunderstood technologies of 2017. Blockchain technology may not be the panacea for healthcare industry challenges but it holds the potential to save billions of dollars by optimizing current workflows and the disintermediation of some high-cost gatekeepers.

Research Scope
The research service analyzes the key trends and developments around blockchain technology and captures the essential building blocks for implementing a healthcare-focused blockchain ecosystem in the next 5–10 years. Differentiating the hype from reality, the study discusses blockchain technology’s most potential applications in some of the pressing needs of the healthcare industry—such as health data interoperability, cybersecurity, insurance fraud management, and drug supply chain provenance.

The study also provides a global flavor around blockchain technology deployment and discusses current adoption trends across major healthcare-focused use cases—such as the adoption timeline, growth opportunities, implementation challenges, government and commercial initiatives, select collaboration or deals, and the key companies and consortiums to watch.

Finally, the study provides strategic imperatives and recommended business models to foster healthcare-focused blockchain ecosystem partnerships for future implementation on a large scale across healthcare use cases.

Key Questions This Study Will Answer
•     What is blockchain technology and what are its implications for the healthcare industry?
•     Who are the key stakeholders in the healthcare blockchain ecosystem?
•     What is the convergence potential for blockchain with emerging healthcare technologies?
•     What are the most promising application areas of blockchain for the healthcare industry?
•     What are the adoption and growth trends for these use cases?
•     Which are the leading companies with healthcare-deployable blockchain solutions?
•     What are the possible business models for blockchain technology deployment in healthcare applications?
•     What are the challenges for implementing blockchain in healthcare?