Unleashing the potential of blockchain in Healthcare Industry: Interview with Aeries Blockchain CTO Pankaj Pathak

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I spoke to Pankaj Pathak — CTO of Aeries Blockchain Corporation — about the challenges faced by the global healthcare industry and how the company plans to use blockchain to save healthcare organisations billions and make the world a healthier, happier place.

Can you tell us a bit about your background and why you decided to focus on blockchain?

I had been working in the software technology industry for the last 20 years but around three years ago I got introduced to Blockchain in one of the conferences since then I am a big fan of distributed technology. After attaining technical leadership experience in companies like Oracle, Motorola & IBM, I started heading towards entrepreneurship and co-founded companies like Rare Mile Technologies & Moonraft Innovation Lab.
I came across various industry trends throughout this journey, however, security and immutability have been major concerns for most of our clients. Blockchain technology isn’t just better than any other technology solutions in the market but also overcome challenges like regulations, privacy, complexity, scalability, and transparency making it the most disruptive technology of the era. After digging deep into this technology, I am totally convinced by the disruptive power of blockchain and its implementation having a long-term horizon.                                                                                                                                                      

What is the current state of healthcare industry?

Worldwide healthcare spend is 7.6 Trillion each year. The US alone spends $3.2 Trillion on healthcare, of which $100 billion a year is the cost of administering healthcare.

Out of this, around 17 billion gets spent on managing clinical records; however the rest of the 80 billion goes on administration. Be that as it may, this imperative circle of our life is considered extremely inefficient. The Institute of Medicine appraises that between 20– 30 percent of total health care spending is either wasteful or a result of poor results.

The primary source of these excessive expenses is high administrative charges, overpriced medicinal tests, futile treatments, medical fraud, and passed up prevention opportunities. As per a few estimations, around $875 Billion being spent on duplicating services because of poor communication amongst doctors and hospitals.

How are you going to solve the problems in healthcare through blockchain?

Being immutable, trustless, decentralized and distributed blockchain technology gives wide chances to battle fraud, cut operational expenses, optimize procedures, kill duplication of work and enhance transparency in the healthcare business.

Blockchain technology may not be the panacea for healthcare industry challenges, but rather it holds the possibility to save billions of dollars by enhancing current workflows and disintermediating some staggering expense gatekeepers.

Blockchain can possibly alleviate one of the significant challenges of the industry: the transmission of patient information crosswise over geologies without trading off its privacy and security. This utilization of blockchain can have a noteworthy, positive impact on individual health administration and additionally give a basic link in the help of medical tourism.

The principle sectors where blockchain technology has an incredible potential for enhancing the healthcare business are:

●      Clinical Health Data Exchange and Interoperability

●      Cases Adjudication and Billing Management

●      Drug Supply Chain Integrity and Provenance

●      Pharma Clinical Trials and Population Health Research

●      Cyber Security and Healthcare IoT

Can you tell us, how are you going to push this to the mainstream?

Aeries Blockchain Corporation is developing a platform based on blockchain technology to solve various persisting challenges in the healthcare Industry. I would summarize our healthcare solutions based on blockchain technology in five key data-driven areas:

Electronic health care records (EHR)

Aeries intend to make a platform which will tackle the issue of health data exchange. This platform will empower distinctive healthcare agents, such as doctors, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacists and insurers to ask for consent to access and interact with medical records. Every interaction is auditable, transparent, and secure, and will be recorded as a transaction on distributed ledger. This solution will ensure security issues as it is based on the  permission based Hyperledger Fabric architecture varying access levels. Therefore, patients will be able to control who can see their records, how much they see and for what time span.

Medical Supply Chain Management (MSCM)
Aeries offers a unique networking marketplace that unites healthcare suppliers and providers for simplified, proficient and cost-effective exchanges that assemble organizations. Utilizing cutting edge innovations and the best practices, Aeries' automated platform makes efficiencies and amplifies revenues, completely through the supply chain process. It enables providers to extend their reach, offer faster, cut down on operational expenses and convey reliable buyer experiences over all touchpoints.

Automated Claims Adjudication and Billing Management
Around 6% of every single medical claim are denied because of inadequate or incorrect data. The blockchain system could automate the claim procedure and dissipate administration layers to decrease transaction costs and frauds.

By utilizing a "smart contract" structure, Aeries blockchain will help flawlessly

adjudicate payers' and patients' provider payments for a more cost-productive process. A smart contract structure empowers a node to execute a transaction for the contract. This logic ensures correct completion of claims and supports consistence audits utilizing business rules.

Interoperability

Aeries plans to beat current patient data interoperability issues and assemble the

massive amounts of patient data that can be encouraged to help population health initiatives using blockchain.

The usage of blockchain technology will address a significant number of the interoperability issues with current health IT standards that include security (particularly data integrity) and privacy, immutably guaranteeing expressed identities, highly robust audit trails and enhancing healthcare-related security for both providers and patients.
Blockchain empowered health IT systems that are irreversible and cryptographically secured, could expel the problem and cost of data reconciliation and give access to both  real time and historic  data to  multiple users at one time.

Drug Supply Chain Integrity and Provenance

Another primary territory that Aeries will improve utilizing blockchain technology is drug supply chain integrity. It is primarily centered around eliminating of counterfeit drugs proliferation and increasing efficiency in the pharmaceutical industry. The solution offers plausibility to track pharmaceuticals through links digital systems to pharmaceuticals moving in the physical world. With a unique ID linked to a digital supply chain the Aeries solution based on blockchain intends to eliminate proliferation of counterfeit drugs.

All that really matters is, healthcare pioneers are not going to adopt it until the point when they see a proven use case. And up until this point, nobody will come together and work on a solution.

Indeed, even with all the difficulties confronting us – despite everything I trust that blockchain is viable solution for advance healthcare. At last, everybody getting and working in healthcare would profit as a result of lower costs from the ease of data exchange and would take into consideration more patient centred care. Sadly, this will digital transformation takes multiple healthcare pioneers, payers, and the government to cooperate and willing to take a risk.

Finally, will blockchain shape the future of healthcare?

​Blockchain technology can possibly shape the future of healthcare, setting the patient at the center of the healthcare ecosystem and enhancing the security, privacy, and interoperability of health data. This technology could give another model to health information exchanges (HIE) by making electronic medical records more proficient, disintermediated, and secure.

Blockchain Development

Significantly, blockchain's potential for healthcare relies upon how ready healthcare associations are to make the required technical infrastructure. Blockchain is expensive, there are a few concerns in regards to its integration with the current technology, and there surely is hypothesis about its cultural adoption.

Be that as it may, one thing is without a doubt blockchain has taken healthcare by storm over the previous year, and there are critical investments for blockchain. With such boundless conceivable outcomes, it is nothing unexpected blockchain appears to be ready to one of the key pillars in the digital world. And possibly sometime in the not so distant future, it will change the enormous data landscape.

About Pankaj

Pankaj Pathak is a serial entrepreneur, innovator and technology evangelist. He has over 18 years of technical leadership experience with companies like Motorola & IBM. He was the co-founder of Rare Mile Technologies & Moonraft Innovation lab and filed patents in distributed computing.

Artificial Intelligence & Blockchain Technology: The New Internet

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Undoubtedly, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are the two most revolutionary innovations which have speeded up the process of technology. In the present era of digital revolution, technology is expanding exponentially, and the interplay of Blockchain technology and Artificial Intelligence is considerable. The convergence of these two prominent technologies has opened the gateways for enhanced efficiency and transparency in operations. But before we switch over to the intricacies involved with these terms, let me untangle you from the web of their definitions.

Blockchain
Blockchain can simply be defined as an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value. It can be pictured as a global giant spreadsheet eliminating the need of third parties to validate transactions, reducing intermediary costs and increasing transparency.

Artificial Intelligence

A machine is said to possess AI if it perceives its surrounding environment and eventually takes such actions which maximize the chances of achieving the aimed goal. AI has proved to be instrumental in a plethora of activities such as optimizing energy consumption, healthcare, finance and economies.

AI Solution

Combining these two aspects can be revolutionary in different ways as explained below:

Improvements in Artificial Intelligence through Blockchain and Vice Versa

Researchers have been looking at ways to utilize Blockchain for improving Artificial Intelligence and vice-versa. Blockchain developers make a good case on why the distributed ledger system is the perfect platform for testing the next generation of developments in A.I.

How Blockchain Can Transform AI?

The current A.I. testing databases are working in what can be known as the red ocean. There is a ton of rivalry. Similar technologies and strategies are being tried with numerous businesses going after the same incremental additions.

A Blockchain-based database for A.I. represents the blue ocean of uncontested markets. This is on the grounds that the technology is still new, secure, and transparent. It can possibly accomplish extraordinary things later on.

A portion of the characteristics that make Blockchain a decent contender for testing and building Artificial Intelligence are plot here.

Decentralized Control and Data Sharing
The Blockchain takes a shot at a decentralized network of nodes, cooperating to solve complex calculations. The mining node on the system which finds the best solution first adds the entry to the blockchain ledger.

Artificial Intelligence operates on a similar model. At the point when a choice must be taken by an A.I. system, it tests the possible solutions and substituting branches of potential outcomes that rise because of taking the first decision. Evaluations of every single possible option are tested to the end result before the A.I. picks the best choice.

What makes Blockchain particularly great is that rather than a single, central system testing every single possible hypothesis, the task is distributed among several nodes spread the world over, which makes the procedure substantially faster.

Additional Security
An A.I system being kept running on a single, central processor is inclined to hacking, as any malcontent just needs to break into a single system to control the guidelines.

Entries to the blockchain must be authenticated by the dominant part of nodes on the network before they are acknowledged and processed into the ledger. The higher the number of nodes that are working on the network, the more troublesome it is to hack the system.

While a Blockchain-based A.I. platform would not be impossible to hack, it is still undeniably hard to control and break such a system.

Greater Trust
With a specific end goal to be reliable, a system must be trusted by public in general by and large. Blockchain permits far more prominent transparency than a closed A.I. system. Records maintained on a Blockchain ledger can be assessed and audited whenever by authorized individuals with access to the system. In the meantime, users who have not been granted access would not have the ability to view anything, as the database is encrypted.

Large Scale Data Management
At their core, Blockchain is a just distributed database that exists on a large number of devices all over the world. This helps keep numerous copies of the data to keep valuable data from ever being lost. Indeed, even on account of natural disasters, there will be sufficient duplicates of the data to keep the underlying system intact.

How AI can transform Blockchain?

Undoubtedly blockchain is extremely powerful but it has its own limitations.

Some of them are technology related while others originate from the old-disapproved of culture acquired from the financial services sector; however every one of them can be resolved by AI in one way or the other.

Energy consumption: Blockchain mining is an extremely hard undertaking that requires a huge amount of energy and then money to be processed.

 AI has already proven to be an extremely efficient in improving energy utilization,

Similar results can be accomplished for the blockchain as well. This would most likely result in bringing down investments in mining hardware.

Scalability: The blockchain is developing at a consistent pace of 1MB every 10 minutes and it as of now signifies 85GB. Satoshi (2008) first specified "blockchain pruning" (i.e., erasing  unnecessary data about fully spent transactions in order to not hold the whole blockchain on a single laptop) as a possible solution yet AI can present new decentralized learning systems,  such as federated learning  for instance, or new data sharding methods to make the systems more productive.

Security: Even if the blockchain is relatively difficult to hack, its further layers and applications may not be that secure. The unfathomable progress made by machine learning over the most recent two years makes AI an awesome partner for the blockchain to ensure a secure applications deployment, particularly given the fixed structure of the system.

Data gates: In a future where all our data will be accessible on blockchain and organizations will have the capacity to directly buy them from us, we will require help to allow access, track data use, and generally make sense of what happens to our personal information at a computer speed. This is a job for intelligent machines.

Conclusion

With both AI and blockchain innovations together in one place, one can effortlessly control on how your data can be utilized for the data set you possess. For different industries where security of data is of prime importance, these technologies will prove to be useful. With both the technologies as of now trending in the industry, the reliance on them guarantees to give more prominent benefits in the coming future.
On the off chance, you are hoping to stay ahead of the competition and want to incorporate blockchain and Artificial Intelligence in your existing business application then you should employ dedicated developers. At Aeries blockchain Corporation, we have a devoted team of blockchain developers who have finished various projects related with Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence for presumed clients since its inception. Reach us at Aeries Blockchain with a specific end goal to ensure you are prepared and settled to deploy cutting edge blockchain and AI solutions for your business.