Role of Blockchain Architecture in Public Health Decision Making by Mohan Tanniru
ABSTRACT:
Healthcare outside a hospital has become a key success factor for both healthcare consumers, who want to leverage personal technology to seek information and gain care-related support, and hospitals, which want to reduce costs by moving care, to the extent possible, to where the healthcare consumer is. In fact, this is one of the key goals of public health organizations, as they have the responsibility to both track and analyze disease conditions among the population at large and to develop policy and practice interventions to get the care to healthcare consumers as a part of their preventive and wellness strategies. However, aligning the goals of both the care providers (e.g. hospitals, public health agencies, primary care clinics, etc.) and healthcare consumers (including patients) faces two major challenges. The first challenge is related to identifying actors outside the provider ecosystem who can bring resources to support consumers seeking care. The second challenge is associated with having an architecture that can be trusted by all to communicate and coordinate activities.
In this talk, we will focus on the potential role of blockchain architecture in supporting both resource sharing and goal alignment among actors involved in public health along the continuum of the public health organization’s decision making. Such decision making includes gathering information about the health conditions of a defined or at-large population and the environment that influences these health conditions (intelligence phase); developing practice choices to address preventive care and wellness (design phase), and selecting practices that are effective in diffusing these to healthcare consumers (choice phase). For those in public health, these three phases of decision making include the fields of epidemiology, environmental and occupational health, public health policy and decision making, and social and behavioral science. Examples are used to illustrate the potential of blockchain to support each of these three phases as it supports both resource sharing and goal alignment. This research is very exploratory in nature.
PLEASE RSVP ON OUR EVENTBRITE PAGE.