The decentralized future of healthcare
The Decentralization pattern
If you've been around the tech scene a bit, you've probably heard the term DeFi. Decentralized Finance aims to free individuals from having to depend on traditional financial institutions for certain transactions.
The concept relies on freely-accessible, decentralized, autonomous, and transparent blockchain software and applications. Yes, lots of buzzwords. But the movement certainly has momentum.
Depending on who you ask, the market for DeFi services is already between 100 and 170 billion euros in size.
What Decentralized Healthcare means
This is why Yair Saperstein, cofounder and CEO of AvoMD, wondered in a blog post if we can't have DeHealth in addition to DeFi. Yair argues that the centralization efforts of the healthcare system have caused healthcare costs to skyrocket. Solutions have not eased the system in recent years—on the contrary, they have only increased the pressure.
According to Yair, however, there are clear signals of a paradigm shift:
- Patients are increasingly gaining access to their electronic health records in real time, which allows them to play an active role in their own care.
- Telemedicine is finally on its way to becoming a disruptive technology.
- Data can be shared between different players.
- Medications, tests, and other items are being sent home.
- And increasingly, care is being provided by in-home services.
"The trend is clear. The future is DeHealth." These were Yair's final sentences–and we agree. A lot has happened in recent years. More and more services have migrated to the periphery of the healthcare network: to us, the people. We can access more and more health preservation services via smartphones, but we can also access official health services directly, without having to enter a walled garden.
Our perspective
In our view, it doesn't matter whether you’re calling it DeHealth, the consumerification of the healthcare market, or blurring boundaries between regulated and unregulated markets. The decentralization of healthcare delivery has been underway for decades.
We are only experiencing it in such a compressed form today because the healthcare sector has caught up with digitalization issues and is slowly opening up. This is all thanks to innovative government policies, changes in consumer preferences, an influx of venture capital, and a growing number of entrepreneurs.
Yes, many questions still need to be answered. Only time will tell what will prevail. But one thing is clear: There is no going back. More and more healthcare services are being delivered in the periphery, in the community, and at home, enabled by technology.