Healthcare waste is one the major factor impacting the US Healthcare spending. According to Berwick and Hackbarth framework introduced in 2012 there are six major areas in the clinical waste in the healthcare - failures of care delivery, failures of care coordination, over treatment, pricing failures, administrative complexity, and fraud & abuse. For our topic, we would be focusing on how the usage of blockchain for care coordination can solve some of the issues related to waste.

• Lack of proactiveness from doctor - If a doctor is not proactive in recommending preventive care it can lead to late detection of health issues causing discomfort for the patient as well as increased cost of care.

• Lack of coordinated care - There are multiple providers involved in a patients journey for healthcare services like doctors, clinics, labs, etc. If the service is not coordinated it can lead to unnecessary tests, medication errors, or costs that can occur.

We will look at how blockchain and technology can help handle couple of instances which lead to wastes in coordinated care.

Proactiveness from doctor is something which is human in nature and cannot be controlled completely thru tech, but it can always leverage data analytics for the on chain data and technology to remind doctors to take proactive measures. This will lead to better quality of care and savings in healthcare expense for patient as well as insurance companies.

Often a medical service needs a patient to visit multiple clinicians like doctor, therapist, Lab, and other care providers. This would need proper coordination across all participating providers ensuring that the data is being shared uniformly and without any gap. This will ensure all the providers have accurate data access and with accuracy since it is stored on private blockchain. Followups can be automated using data analytics from the chain to send timely reminders. This would avoid any duplication of effort or missing information leading to higher quality of medical services and reduced waste.

These are couple of instances in case of coordinated care where blockchain and technology can help improve the quality of care along with reduced cost of care. Healthcare should be at the forefront of using tech to improve the quality of care and reduce the ever increasing burden on economy.

https://accountablecaredoctors.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/5.questions.pdf

https://www.medsocietysc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/JAMA_ReducingWaste.pdf