Towards the creation of a new healthcare

Abstract

Everyone talks about blockchain, and many are the promises that still are not clearly proved true to date. This work aims at understanding the diffusion and adoption of blockchain technology relatively to the healthcare sector. The paper starts with an introduction to the financial side of healthcare and its weight on the current budget of Nations. Then, we present an excursus on the literature dealing with innovation, more specifically, with diffusion and adoption of innovations, and we present as well the concept of disruptive innovation, represented by the blockchain in sectors such as the financial one –that we do not cover except for the presentation of the Blockchain with its first application. The study case points on four cases: two public entities, the government of Estonia and the European Union trying to push towards the application of blockchain in the healthcare sector, and two private entities offering Blockchain solutions.

After the analysis, we found that the example case given by Estonia, having spent only 1 year for the adoption of Blockchain might be hard to repeat both from the EU and for the private entities we analyzed: as stakeholders increase, so will the time to adoption due to different interests and integration between the parties.