Case Study: Blockchain and E-prescription Process

Abstract

Healthcare is an industry that highly values security, privacy and accessibility of data between patients and healthcare service providers. Prescriptions are an important part of healthcare services that enable patients to get medicine required for their treatment. About a decade ago, prescriptions were mostly handwritten on paper, today most countries use some form of e-prescription systems. E-prescriptions solved many problems that paper prescriptions had, for example pharmacists correctly not understanding what is written on the prescription and dispensing wrong medicine. E-prescription systems still have problems like lack of interoperability between providers and data security and fragmentation issues. Blockchain is one of the new emerging technologies that enables to securely store data using shared ledger, communicate the data between participants of the blockchain network, perform computational tasks via smart contracts and manage assets. These characteristics have potential to impact healthcare sector including e-prescription process. The thesis investigates how Estonian e-prescription process could be redesigned using blockchain technology. For that a case study is conducted to examine the Estonian as-is state of the e-prescription process and propose redesign based on blockchain technology. During the case study, systematic literature review was conducted on the subject to discover blockchain based redesign opportunities. In addition, redesign heuristics were applied on the as-is model. The results of the case study showed that using blockchain as the underlying technology is possible in Estonian case, but it would no bring significant value compared to existing process and Estonia has solved issues that blockchain can improve using different technologies.