Secure Insight

Systems professionals with a deep understanding of the regulatory environment in healthcare (or banking, frankly) are best equiped to devising and adapting the most favorable attributes of blockchain design to suit industry data-processing needs. To that I might add that a deep understanding of optimal process would also come in very handy.

We have long struggled in heath care to determine  what "optimal" workflows really look like. Hospitals and clinicians look to the software vendor to provide efficient data-processing solutions, but software companies rarely have any real understanding of HOW care is best provided. Mostly, the vendors just know what functionality is MOST POPULAR with their customers--hardly a good substitution for optimized processing of data based on optimized understanding of care.

The resulting systems, no matter how beautifully tricked out with functionality, are incredibly rigid and are difficult to modify, or worse, transfer into newer systems as growth and market evolution inevitably demand. Our legacy systems really can't keep up with the enormous data growth we expect to see in information processing. Add to that the cost of cut-over into next-gen systems, seen against a background of exacting regulatory oversight, and suddenly you understand why banking and healthcare entities would rather "fight than switch," at least as far as systems go.

This is where, I believe, blockchain might be a truly innovative disruptor. One of the curious aspects of blockchain is that the history of the transaction becomes part of the record, whether it's a banking record, a unit of currency, or a healthcare record.

If we were to tuck the history of the transaction right into the transaction itself (and provide interested stakeholders in a shared use of and access to this history), it's easy to see that an organization's core processing system might well be "set free," to a certain extent, from maintaining the large (and ever-increasing) sea of information. Instead, the processing system will focus more on the transformational aspects of the entity's business and the "value-add" that the organization brings to the data.

Banking and healthcare are two marketplaces where regulatory oversight is significant and increasing. Whatever benefit we might see in blockchain, and I suspect there is great potential value there, we need to be keenly aware of HOW we best accomplish our work in healthcare, and how we do so WITHIN the given regulatory environment. Professionals with experience in these critical areas will be most suited to developing and exploiting the promise of blockchain.