launcht Over the course of time we have witnessed a large number of industries and organizations adopting blockchain technology as its mainframe to offer solutions. And with its recent surge, a recent PwC Health Research Institute survey revealed that nearly half of the healthcare executives are now planning on developing or adopting the same. However, implementation challenges persist, including a lack of trust, governance, and expertise.
While blockchain is widely viewed as inherently secure — and could ultimately increase trust among stakeholders — many remain skeptical. Of the 74 global healthcare companies surveyed, 47 percent cited lack of trust as a top concern of blockchain use. Lack of expertise is also a major barrier. Sixty-one percent of executives said that a lack of appropriate blockchain skills on the team impeded their blockchain projects. Other significant concerns included lack of governance structure (43%), regulatory uncertainty (39%), and interoperability (36%).
Blockchain could simplify and automate these processes, in some cases saving companies weeks of effort, revenue and lost opportunities. Companies that are slow to change may lose out to ones that use the technology to cut costs and increase efficiencies.
In order to reap the benefits of blockchain, however, organizations must overcome barriers to adoption. To facilitate adoption, executives should first identify a single, clear use case for the technology. Once executives identify a use case, experts recommend that they should leverage that case to find partners, work out technological issues, and solve specific problems. Blockchain-based technologies offer substantial opportunities to reinvent how healthcare companies access, collect, distribute, share, leverage, monitor and audit data. In some sectors, disruption of the status quo is already underway, and companies have just a few years before full-scale blockchain implementations begin to appear on the market.
