VIDEO | Avaneer Health, Sr. VP Technology Operations: Blockchain Allows Data to be Decentralized

(US and Canada) Dan Sanders, Senior VP Technology Operations, Security and Service Delivery, Avaneer Health, speaks with Della Shea, Chief Data Governance & Privacy Officer, Symcor Inc., about blockchain as a technology and its application in the health care sector.

Sanders has been in the IT industry for over 26 years, with about 15 years in direct or indirect health care. Over the years, he noticed the disconnected state of the health care ecosystem and the need to address it. He expresses excitement about building a blockchain-enabled health care network that will serve as the backbone and infrastructure with the utilities necessary to accelerate health care and work together.

Speaking on some of the critical challenges that technologies like blockchain can improve, he says that blockchain is an immutable agreement system that solves many problems, allowing multiple entities to work together. It will enable data to be decentralized yet fully transparent and highly secured. Given the siloed nature of health care and the repetitive tasks, blockchain offers multiple stakeholders the opportunity to operate jointly without the traditional fears and risks of opening up to another entity's process and requirements.

Sanders mentions that the health care sector is at an inflection point, and blockchain will be at the center of it. The automated agreement against necessity on both sides of a transaction streamlines the entire process and makes it easier to address areas that need focus. The health care sector, as a whole, is now in a better position to adopt blockchain more widely than ever before, he adds.

He then explains that a significant problem is the need for a network of payers, providers, and all the stakeholders involved to access data appropriately, understand its origins, run analytics on it, and make it generally available securely. Blockchain is a critical piece of these new types of networks that will be formed as an infrastructure layer to allow these efficiencies.

In conclusion, Sanders says that the infrastructure layer is critical to allowing a better way of smoothening data access at scale from all parties involved. It also requires a verification layer to add to the needed capabilities so that it is not a free for all situation.