Pharma’s first steps in decentralized healthcare data trading
Even outside Estonia, there are projects which have such a decentralized system in mind:
Roche Diagnostics, for example, has teamed up with Ocean Protocol to enable secure, real-time transmission of private medical data. In a pilot involving 150 patients, they want to automate the exchange of critical blood levels from patients’ self-monitoring device CoaguChek INRange with their hospitals. Thereby, the blockchain guarantees the integrity and provenance of the data and ensures auditability and trust. With their project, Roche and Ocean Protocol take a step towards a decentralized healthcare data marketplace.
DLT is not a panacea for healthcare system integration and data standardization. While it holds high potential for addressing the system’s current pain points, neither are the regulatory requirements for this new model sufficiently clear in most countries, nor have all of the distributed ledger technologies available reached a state in which they are ready to be deployed at scale. This notwithstanding, we are currently dealing with an increasingly complex – some may even say broken – market, which demands exploring new, more collaborative models.
DLT, especially blockchain, may allow us to create a system that is defined by trust and mutual benefit. For pharmaceutical companies, this may appear to be a big effort and mindset change initially but being able to access such great amounts of diverse data sets would also entail enormous opportunities for clinical research and, finally, patient outcome.