🪙 Blockchain Powered Healthcare

Good morning! 

Welcome to Healthcare AI News, your weekly dose of the latest developments and headlines in the world of Healthcare AI.

In this issue, we explore:

✅ Headline: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman asks Congress to regulate AI

✅ Feature: Blockchain-Empowered Healthcare

✅ Industry: Kaiser Permanente announces new grant program for AL and ML

✅ Tech: Amazon Omics’ new capabilities for Healthcare & life science customers

✅ Deal Flow: Fifth Third completes acquisition of Big Data Healthcare

Be sure to read on to see this week's Top headlines, Industry, Tech, and M&A news.

Let's dive in.

HEADLINE ROUNDUP

• Hippocratic is building a LLM for Healthcare (Read more)

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman asks Congress to regulate AI (Read more)

• Apple's new $3K headset could be used by surgeons (Read more)

• Google Cloud launches AI-powered solutions to safely accelerate drug discovery and precision medicine (Read more)

• AI tool detects Parkinson's up to 15 years early with 96% accuracy (Read more)

• Roots automation introduces InsurGPT - the world's most advanced Generative AI model for insurance (Read more)

• The groundbreaking plan to map the entire human immune system (Read more)

• Google announces bold progress in AI, advancing Med-PaLM 2 for healthcare (Read more)

• AI ethicist proposes framework for generative AI in Healthcare (Read more)

• Virgin Pulse takes personalized well-being to the next level with new AI-powered Homebase for Health® enhancements (Read more)

💡 Keep reading to catch up on Industry, Tech & Deal flow

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THE FEATURE

Blockchain Empowered Healthcare

The earliest developments in blockchain and healthcare go back to 2016. But at that time, using this powerful technology to even facilitate better health records sounded more like a fairy tale.

Nowadays, blockchain solutions entered nearly every aspect of the healthcare system — from improving the patient’s experience and easing the doctor’s job to streamlining data for health insurance providers.

And it’s just a matter of time before blockchain will be fully adopted in healthcare.

According to a study conducted by Industry Research, by 2030, blockchain in healthcare will be valued at $3.1 billion. The innovative potential of this technology, when it meets healthcare, is significant, as it can fundamentally shift the entire health insurance industry.

The blockchain is known by many as the technology behind Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. However, it’s not just about digital payment systems and virtual currencies. Blockchain is a new approach to data and security. Every blockchain system follows three principles: decentralization, distribution, and trustlessness.

These features prove to be vital when it comes to healthcare and primarily the health insurance domain. Blockchain can rapidly boost the industry's efficiency by resolving key pain points, from storage decentralization and data transparency to immutability and user privacy protection.

Blockchain has many use cases in health insurance. Medicalchain already has a solution to facilitate interaction between clients and insurers, providing a unified patient database. Avaneer Health develops an ambitious solution to improve the security and interoperability of medical records. Avaneer’s solution will ease health administration processes and make them more secure.

Opportunities

Scientific research is what drives innovation and improves patient outcomes. And with biopharma companies spending between $2.6B and $6.7B to roll out just a single medicine, it is evident that the current state of healthcare research & development could be better.

Bringing blockchain into healthcare research & development can lead to faster collaborations and improve scientific opportunities.

It’s not the first time that human error and hurdles by data-sharing have led to the death of a patient. According to the pre-pandemic estimate, over 250,000 patients died from human error, system malfunctions, and other preventable issues.

Blockchain technology has the potential to positively impact healthcare by enhancing the security and integrity of medical records. By implementing this technology throughout the healthcare system, we can promote data accuracy and reduce the likelihood of errors that may contribute to adverse patient outcomes. While blockchain cannot eliminate all risks, its adoption can help create a safer and more efficient healthcare environment.

Challenges

There are many challenges, mainly of a legal nature, that blockchain must overcome to be widely accepted. Even within the digital payment systems, where distributed ledger solutions receive the most attention and funding, many improvements still need to be made.

In the case of healthcare, the situation is further complicated, as blockchain solutions must also be interoperable with existing platforms and comply with legal regulations. It’s a long way to go until blockchain becomes commonplace.

The next problem between blockchain-empowered platforms and their use in healthcare is the adoption price. In other words, who will cover the hefty development and technology integration costs?

The social distrust of the general public toward blockchain technologies is another major obstacle to their widespread use. By the end of 2022, only 8% of Americans had a positive outlook on blockchain solutions.

Therefore, for blockchain developers, winning the average user's trust is a crucial thing to do. Otherwise, the doors to the healthcare industry will remain firmly shut.

Case Studies

Avaneer Health strives to create a participant-based network with improved medical data interoperability and security. The platform is focused on streamlining healthcare administration processes, where participants can deploy their products and rapidly transfer data across medical communities.

Health insurance giants like Elevance Health, HCSC, and others back the startup with a whopping $50 million seed funding.

Medicalchain the high integrity of medical records is a critical concern for everyone involved in the healthcare industry: patients, doctors, and insurance providers. Medicalchain solves this problem by making medical records quickly accessible for all authorized parties without compromising data security.

The platform is a perfect solution for the patient and health insurers, as it allows them to “cut out the middle-man” and gain access to the verified information directly. Medicalchain is also on a good funding record, having raised $24 million from BlockVC

What’s next?

Envisioning the future is always challenging. However, at the moment, it’s evident that blockchain technology is to stay in the healthcare system of the future. The benefits it gives the communities, regulatory bodies, and health insurance firms can't be underestimated.

Blockchain adoption challenges in healthcare are vast, namely the absence of regulations, considerable social distrust, and lack of investors. But they are possible to overcome soon.

As the journey of integrating blockchain technology in healthcare progresses, we can expect to witness transformative changes and enhancements in the way healthcare services are delivered and managed, ultimately leading to better outcomes for all involved.

INDUSTRY NEWS

• 7 health systems using AI to ease clinicians' documentation burden (Read more)

• Kaiser Permanente announces new grant program for AI and ML in Healthcare (Read more)

• US pharmacy giant says hackers accessed personal data of almost 6 million patients (Read more)

• Can AI predict a person's Alzheimer's risk? UMass Chan researchers say yes (Read more)

• US FTC sues to block Amgen's $27.8 billion deal for Horizon Therapeutics (Read more)

• Congressional Committee regulators question Cigna system that lets its doctors deny claims without reading patient files (Read more)

• Eric Schmidt on synthetic biology, AI, Ethics and the bioeconomy’s ‘Seismic Shift’ (Read more)

• WHO calls for safe and ethical AI for health (Read more)

• Predictive analytics model forecasts diabetic kidney disease (Read more)

• More than 70% of Americans feel failed by the Healthcare System (Read more)

TECH NEWS

• Microsoft AI research introduces Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO): A simple and general-purpose framework for the automatic optimization of LLM prompts (Read more)

• The pros and cons of combining the CIO, chief digital officer roles (Read more)

• New capabilities make it easier for healthcare and life science customers to get started, build applications, and scale-up on Amazon Omics (Read more)

• Why should Blockchain apps be the next investment for growing enterprises? (Read more)

• Introducing Postbot, Postman’s new AI assistant (Read more)

• Benchmarking LLMS performance (Read more)

• DevSecOps principles and key steps for securing the CI/CD Pipeline (Read more)

• Executives fear accidental sharing of corporate data with ChatGPT: Report (Read more)

DEAL FLOW

• Pfizer to raise $31 billion in debt offering to fund Seagen acquisition, SEC filing shows (Read more)

• Venture capital fund raises $320M, plans to target healthcare (Read more)

• Fifth Third completes acquisition of Big Data Healthcare, further accelerating bank’s digital payments and managed services offerings (Read more)

• Amino Health secures $80 Million in financing to accelerate growth and product innovation (Read more)

• MultiPlan acquires leading healthcare data and analytics firm Benefits Science LLC (Read more)

• HSBC Life makes $20 million AI investment (Read more)

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