Hitching Healthcare to the Chain: An Introduction to Blockchain Technology in the Healthcare Sector

Health services must balance patient care with information privacy, access, and completeness. The massive scale of the healthcare industry also amplifies the importance of cost control. The promise of blockchain technology in health services, combined with application layers built atop it, is to be a mechanism that provides utmost privacy while ensuring that appropriate users can easily add to and access a permanent record of information. Blockchains, also called distributed ledgers, enable a combination of cost reduction and increased accessibility to information by connecting stake-holders directly without requirements for third-party brokers, potentially giving better results at lower costs. New ventures are looking to apply blockchain technology to solve real-world problems, including efforts to track public health, centralize research data, monitor and fulfill prescriptions, lower administrative overheads, and organize patient data from an increasing number of inputs. Here, concrete examples of the application of blockchain technology in the health sector are described, touching on near-term promise and challenges.