blockchain

Bitcoin ATM at a Las Vegas casino.

This link explains how a sister technology of bitcoin could change the future of healthcare. It’s a computer code called blockchain — the purportedly unbreakable security backbone of all bitcoin transactions.

“It helps to think about a blockchain kind of like a global computer,” Micah Winkelspecht, founder and CEO of Gem, a blockchain technology company, told Becker’s Hospital Review. “It’s a giant machine that allows us to interoperate with each other and to do that in a very trusted way. Economists call it the global trust machine — a giant network of connected computers all operating together to come to a consensus on what is true.”

Mr. Winkelspecht told the news service that every time   that patients see their physicians, they create wakes of digital activity that ripple through the care continuum, from the pharmacists who fill prescriptions to the pharmaceutical firms from which they order drugs.

“What the blockchain allows us to do is create a new type of fabric for the underlying infrastructure of the entire healthcare industry. It would allow all parties — from insurers to providers — to connect in real-time and share information essentially instantly, without having to pass paper or even data back and forth.”