Blockchain technology is a radical innovation with the potential to disrupt and re-imagine more collaborative established business structures and processes. Significant advances, particularly in the payments space, include newer, faster, and less costly options for moving money. The underlying blockchain technology can be used for broader use cases spanning several verticals, including healthcare - although its adoption here is less than complete. Numerous proofs-of-concept and pilots have been executed and are increasing, although enterprise blockchain applications in healthcare at the production scale enabling transformative constituent processes are limited. In this article, the authors analyze the blockchain in healthcare literature for critical success factors and add practitioner views on crossing the chasm from proof-of-concept and pilots to a transformational scale. We explore 24 articles for key inflections for scale and highlight the need for a multifaceted execution framework to resolve the practical barriers to enabling reimagined network-based blockchain use cases for efficiencies, particularly in disparate health systems such as the U.S. In addition, we introduce the blockchain discovery framework to make this emerging technology meet the mainstream operations at scale systematically and in a stair-stepped and future-proofed manner, addressing practical stakeholder concerns. Finally, the authors present a reference case study discovered through the framework of one such healthcare administrative process for a scaled reimagined implementation. Healthcare executives and portfolio managers will benefit from these insights and help to increase the enterprise adoption of this inevitable technology of the future.
Plan language summary: This article presents a practitioner's view of operating in emerging technology, exploring and advancing blockchain-based transformation in healthcare. Blockchain technology is maturing quickly, with financial technology (aka fintech) leading the way with efficient options for moving money, particularly in the public permissionless blockchain segment. The underlying technology allows for a broader set of capabilities, including provenance, data sharing, immutability, non-repudiation, and auditability, which provides for complete rethinking of existing business processes. These features can help to reimagine a more comprehensive set of use cases in many disciplines, including healthcare. However, enterprise adoption needs to catch up.
Keywords: adoption; blockchain; blockchain technology; healthcare; scale; transformation.
© 2023 The Authors.