ibm blockchain

This white paper is intended to assist the Government with market research/health related research only. It is not intended as a commitment that IBM will further

develop blockchain technology, nor that blockchain technology will address specific health related requirements. IBM is the sole author, creator, and owner of

the submission, or has the right to use the information herein. The submission, to the best of IBM’s knowledge, does not and will not violate or infringe upon the

intellectual property rights, privacy rights, publicity rights, or other legal rights of any third party.

Blockchain: The Chain of Trust and its Potential

to Transform Healthcare – Our Point of View

“Use of Blockchain in Health IT and Health-related

Research” Ideation Challenge

Blockchain: The Chain of Trust and its Potential to Transform Healthcare – Our Point of View

Executive Summary

As it has for centuries, commerce relies on two things: trust and verified identity. Put more simply:

What is being exchanged, and who is confirming it? Yet commerce that was once direct and in-person

is today conducted mostly online and requires intermediaries such as banks, governments, or other

central authorities to verify the identity of each party and establish the needed trust between them.

And whenever there are intermediaries there are inefficiencies – decreased speed, increased cost,

and sometimes even fraud. Privacy, too, can be affected, and the centralized information stores of the

intermediaries can be vulnerable to attacks. The famous 1993 cartoon by Peter Stein in The New Yorker

sums up the trust limitation that is inherent in online commerce: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re

a dog.” Twenty-three years later, the world is still working to overcome this limitation with a commerce-

parties, enabling an Internet of Value. What TCP/IP has been for the exchange of information, blockchain

can be for the exchange of value. The Economist stated it well, calling blockchain “the trust machine”

and “the great chain of being sure about things”.

As the technology behind the bitcoin

digital currency, blockchain’s birth is

traced to the pseudonymous, unidentified

person (or group) known as Satoshi

Nakamoto. In recent years blockchain

has gained more widespread use in

other realms, with a variety of new

single entity. The distributed ledger makes it easier to create cost-efficient commercial relationships

where virtually anything of value can be tracked and traded without requiring a central point of control.

Blockchain promises to put privacy and control of data back in the hands of citizens. Trust and integrity

will be established without reliance on third-party intermediaries. IBM believes blockchain is an

extraordinarily important phenomenon with the potential to transform industries and upend business

models. In this paper, we discuss the challenges in the healthcare system and how blockchain can

potentially solve them.

“Over the past two decades, the Internet has

revolutionized many aspects of business and

society... Yet the basic mechanics of how people

Senior VP, IBM Research

1 of 9

Blockchain: The Chain of Trust and its Potential to Transform Healthcare – Our Point of View

Healthcare Challenges and How Blockchain Can Solve Them

The healthcare ecosystem is complex, with multiple stakeholders and intricate, sensitive interactions.

This leads to both data security and privacy challenges and operational inefficiencies. Ownership and

trusted access to medical information and administrative data is critical, yet the process must be made

simpler and less costly.

In healthcare, new research is seeking to apply blockchain’s distributed ledger and decentralized

database solutions to the critical issues of interoperability, security, record universality, and more.

Intriguing uses in other industries are being extended to healthcare, such as extending blockchain’s

smart contracts to provider network management or connecting myriad medical devices through

common, blockchain-enabled systems of information relationships. While technical consensus on a

distributed ledger for healthcare has yet to emerge, with debate ongoing regarding scalability, security,

With blockchain, a business network allows members to exchange items of value through a distributed

ledger that each member possesses and whose content is always in sync. Its cost-efficiency and

- Smart contracts that authorize and notarize each transaction

Table 1 lists today’s most prominent healthcare industry pain points and IBM’s views on blockchain’s

potential impact on them.

Interoperability,

accessibility,

and data integrity

[10]

[5]

Table 1: Healthcare pain points and potential blockchain solutions