Blockchain and population health

Abstract

Background: Blockchain technology has made great strides in many industries but has yet to impact the world of public health. Population health issues such as outbreak surveillance and controlled substance tracking during emergencies all require a secure, easily accessible database. While the healthcare industry is typically slow to adapt to change, blockchain technology lends itself well to many healthcare issues.

Methods: We utilized a 3D framework using difficulty, novelty and necessity to examine the adoption of blockchain technology in population health, based on the 2D framework of difficulty and novelty as driving factors for the development of foundational technologies in the world of business by Iansiti and Lakhani in The Harvard Business Review.

Results: We find that by implementing the third dimension of necessity into an evaluation framework, we can better predict the adoption of technology. We found how different areas of population health fit into the evaluation framework and how necessity can eliminate barriers from implementing novel technologies.

Conclusion: The byproduct of this paper will be the extension of the Iansiti and Lakhani framework. We will show that blockchain, in all of these domains, shows promise to improve population health as we move past COVID-19 and into the future of healthcare.

Keywords: blockchain; population health; public health; secure distributed database.