Name: Here’s How the Blockchain Is Disrupting Healthcare
Uploaded: 2016-11-02
Duration: 4 min 31 s
Description: Gem CEO Micah Winkelspecht explains.

[ MUSIC ] I'm Micah Winkelspecht the CEO and founder of Gem Ware Blockchain Infrastructure company, and we're bringing block in technology in to the healthcare field. So currently we are standing at 3. 2 trillion on healthcare, and we are increasing that cost by about 5. 6 % every year. And yet our outcomes are the most expensive costs, are not really changing. You still have a one in five chance of returning to a hospital within 30 days of being discharged. And if we look at the cost structure of what we're spending money on. About 25 % of that is considered pure waste and the waste, if you look really closely what's causing it is two things. The one is its administrative cost of dealing with all these massive amount of data and it's not getting, it's a failure to get the appropriate data to the appropriate person at the right time so they can make and form intelligent decisions and their decision proves So I really believe that block chains can serve as a function that can help solve that problem in the health care industry. So if you think about what a block chain does, how many people are familiar with block chains? Quick show of hands. Okay great, so you know how hard this is to explain in five minutes But essentially a block chain performs a few very important functions. So one is it's sort of like a global database for an entire industry. And we can use this to store shared common data that all parties need to access. Access and it can act as a sentually a global system of record for the entire industry so that's one thing. Now it's built on top of a foundation that has built integrity, data integrity based on strong cryptography and what this means, that where we would have normally trusted intermediaries to marshal data back and forth, we can actually use the block chain to remove those intermediaries and middle men. And so you get huge op ex efficiency. And finally, it's a global computer. And so we can use the blockchain to essentially automate a lot of the logic associated with our data in ways that we were never able to do before. And that's super powerful. So the Block chain is very new in healthcare. But actually, we're just now celebrating the eighth anniversary of block chains. And it was invented in the height of the financial crisis. With the intent of essentially replacing the global financial system with a new form of digital cash. But what was really interesting about this was that, rather than displacing the banks. The banks actually saw this as an opportunity to increase their own operational efficiencies with this technology. And so Accenture just said about 90 % of the largest banks are now actively developing with this technology. And IBM just recently did a survey that said about 15 % of banks expect to go to production by next year, and 66 % to production by 2020. And yet has very little use in the healthcare industry. And I'm gonna today talk about the three areas where I think it can the highest impact value in the healthcare industry. So the first is patient- centric care coordination. We can leverage the block chain to essentially create universal patient identifiers. That aggregates data across multiple disparate IT systems towards one single global ID so that we can truly get the very first longitudinal health record for a patient without having to move the data to a central location. And we did a project with Phillips to demonstrate this. The second area I think it could have a huge impact on Opex. Is in the supply chain industry. So currently, supply chain is the second largest expense for hospitals outside of personnel cost. And we can leverage the block chain to essentially track the movement and provenance of the most valuable items that move throughout our systems, and we can build intelligent automated systems around that movement. And so there's a lot of work that's been done in the supply chain industry, and other industries we can bring that to healthcare. And finally, The area that we're really working hard on right now is on the revenue cycle management side of things. We are doing a partnership with Capital One to essentially leverage the blockage decoordination mechanism and tool to coordinate payments between providers, payers, and the underlying banks. What this allows for us to do is to completely eliminate The need for data reconciliation across all these different parties. And that will, essentially, save us massive amounts of efficiencies. And so, if you're really interested in learning more about block chains, I will be around. It certainly warrants a much longer discussion. So thank you very much. [ APPLAUSE ] [ MUSIC ]