Chapter 7 Blockchain 3.0 for sustainable healthcare

With increased digitization, huge amount of data is being generated in relation to patient health information, electronic health records, Internet of things (IoT)- based health monitoring systems, insurance data and lot more. Blockchain 3.0 offers huge distributed storage space without much resources at your end, provides scalability without sacrificing security, helps integrating data from different sources without compromising privacy, delivers transparency without revealing ownerships, ensures interoperability without much complexities and establishes provenance with authenticity. Flexibility and multidimensional capability of blockchain technology offers a lot of potential for innovation, integration and sustainability in the healthcare space. Amalgamation of artificial intelligence, analytics and smart contracts helps leveraging core blockchain technology to create better value preposition for all the stakeholders vis-avis entire value chain of healthcare segment. This can be helpful in healthcare audits, clinical research, fighting counterfeit medicines, medical compliances, government regulations, drug supply chain management, claim settlements and many more. This chapter aims at explaining different applications, approaches and models of Blockchain 3.0 implementation across entire value chain of the healthcare system and discusses the most important use cases that can lead to transformation and adds to the sustainability of the entire healthcare industry. This chapter discusses blockchain adoption journey from the technological perspective, viewpoint of challenges, implementation strategies and the way forward. This chapter presents how blockchain technology can impact and affect the broad segments of the healthcare space and improves sustainability. The first and most important use case explains how blockchain helps creating, exchanging and maintaining complete, accurate, secure and transferable healthcare records of patients with all compliances in-place. Smart contracts provide regulated and transparent access to data and can help conflict free faster claim settlement without the need of a middleman. Second use case explains how blockchain can help streamlining the processes of healthcare insurance companies and adds value to the patients as well as to the healthcare business. Blockchain along with artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analytics helps research and clinical trial management by way of drawing inferences from huge amount of data, fixing accountability and distributing research report in an efficient and cheaper way for faster and better scientific research outcomes. Third case study illustrates the use of Blockchain 3.0 for better management of clinical trials. The fourth use case explains how blockchain improves pharmaceutical supply chain management and mitigates the risk of counterfeit, fake and unapproved drugs and equipment. Of course the adoption of Blockchain 3.0 in medical segment is slow but the value addition offered by the technology to the sustainability of healthcare system have drawn the attentions of researchers, governments and healthcare companies to invest in this domain for a greater and better tomorrow.