For all the buzz surrounding Blockchain and its abundant possibilities, the surface has only been scratched on the technology’s potential impact on the healthcare space.
Dr. Paul A. Markham, president and CEO of Milwaukee-based V3 Health Strategy, is hoping to dig deeper into the well of possibilities of the new technology by offering blockchain consulting services to healthcare businesses. V3 Health Strategy helps healthcare companies with research into blockchain and Initial Coin Offerings, and assists them in developing strategies for implementing the technology into their businesses.
“Blockchain is something that is going to impact everybody,” Markham said. “For us in healthcare, (Blockchain) is unbelievably timely.”
From Markham’s vantage point, Blockchain is a natural technology to wrap around the healthcare industry by virtue of its design. Data stored through the system is resistant to future modification, wards off hackers, and has features verifying transactions between two parties.
The strong security hallmarks of Blockchain fit hand-in-glove into the sensitive, confidential information healthcare providers and patients alike share regularly, Markham said.
Blockchain also helps foster all of the technical intricacies that have long been a standard within the industry.
“Everything in healthcare, technically, is a contract,” Markham said. “It’s one gigantic contract.”
In the company’s most recent news release, Alan Gilbert, chief growth officer with V3 Health Strategy, said Blockchain holds the potential for offering up boundless solutions to healthcare in the road ahead.
“After decades in the healthcare domain, I have not witnessed a more timely hybrid solution in the market,” Gilbert said in the statement. “The application of Blockchain infrastructure can have a significant positive impact in the clinical, financial and administrative functions in healthcare.”
Gilbert went one step further in his assessment, adding, “Never before has a revolutionary change come to healthcare that has the real opportunity to bend the cost curve and truly improve outcomes, reduce cost and make healthcare more efficient.”
V3 Health Strategy, which has introduced an assortment of marketplace solutions since its launch, entered a new chapter in its still-brief life in late February with the introduction of a product known as the Blockchain Initial Coin Offering advisory services portfolio.
Initial coin offerings, or ICOs, are the cryptocurrency equivalency of the initial public offerings, or IPOs, that have long been synonymous with traditional companies’ launches into the stock market.
“It’s a novel, radically different way of raising money,” Markham said of ICOs. “But it’s still a model to raise capital.”
The ICO solution V3 Health Strategy launched is designed to look ahead to the future of cryptocurrency, Markham said. Unlike IPOs, the still-burgeoning practice of ICOs remains unregulated.
But Markham said he and others closely aligned with cryptocurrencies know the inevitabilities of regulation lie on the horizon. For this reason, the Blockchain-based solution launched in February is designed to be proactive with standards and protocol in place.
“We are taking steps and working ahead before the regulation comes,” Markham said. “It’s been extremely well received.”
V3 Health Strategy has roots stretching back to 2006 — two years before Blockchain’s invention. The company has evolved over time, though Markham said next generation strategies have, and continue to, be the guiding force.
Featured image via Wiki Commons
