Blockchain is among the top 10 technologies expected to change our future and the future of business in the coming years. The Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020 not only talk about hyper-automation, artificial intelligence, and distributed cloud, but also about blockchain applications (examples).
And if we think about the people-centric macro area, we cannot help but immediately think of the healthcare sector, especially public healthcare.
But let’s take a step back.
The advent of digital transformation has caused a metamorphosis not only in the economy, management, and business sectors but transversally, it has affected all areas of society and changed communication strategies at a frenetic and unstoppable pace.
Just a few decades ago, only science fiction and technology enthusiasts could mix and hybridize the real and virtual using the soft machines of Burroughs and the mutant bodies of Cronenberg. But now, having surpassed Benjamin’s technical reproducibility barrier and purged the deviant and subversive charge attributed to the machine, we have been catapulted – often without tools and training – into a globalized and interconnected society, where the need to retrieve information and interact in real-time has involved a multitude of actors and has forced us to provide easily accessible and flexible responses, often automated.
The irreversible change we are witnessing is radically transforming society and its needs, creating new professions and expanding demand. This digital transformation has affected every sector, from productive to public service providers. And it is precisely in the so-called common good sector that Strategic Technology can make a difference.
Think, for example, of a patient’s medical history. Often fragmented and incomplete, supported exclusively by dusty paper archives or the memory of clinicians. The result? Difficulty in retrieving information, performing diagnoses, or simply prescribing therapies. Folders of reports transported with great difficulty by the individual patient from one hospital to another, often in different cities. And at the end of this somewhat nostalgic tunnel, a digital access key that in real-time returns us the entire patient’s journey. From a simple transition to the new general practitioner to healthcare flows, population health mappings, and the distribution of chronic or infectious diseases.
Blockchain technology allows these sensitive and fundamental clinical information in a person’s life to be shared, verified, and immutable.
In the short term, it might seem like a certainty and quick response, resulting in the streamlining of bureaucracy and the digitization of services, but the simplification in data retrieval would also avoid fraud and incorrect healthcare services, creating certain and non-redundant care profiles, facilitating control operations – for example, on virus spread – with targeted intervention for containment and treatment of the pathology.
Lower costs and secure information management. Risk reduction and smart solutions for both users and service providers, in other words, a better quality of life for everyone.
The digital revolution we are going through can and must be the driving force for simplification and humanization of care. We need to guide the ongoing change actively and not passively undergo it, and it is precisely this development path that, by aiming at innovation, will allow us to achieve equitable distribution of possibilities, guaranteeing more appropriate healthcare for everyone.
In this scenario, blockchain technology – with its guarantees of immutability and clarity – could represent that technological solution capable of generating true public value.
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