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.