DIGIPHARM had the opportunity to showcase a poster demonstrating the innovative use of blockchain technology in value-based healthcare, on May 2-3 2019 at the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM) Conference at Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

ICHOM is a non-profit organization committed to transforming health care to a value-based system through universal measurement and reporting of patient outcomes. Given the significant influence which value-based health care will have on the healthcare industry in the near future, the engagement which ICHOM has demonstrated to help guide the shift towards patient-centred outcomes and value is a notable one. Working groups comprising of clinical leaders, registry leaders, and patients developed global Standard Sets by medical condition or population, through a structured, consensus-driven process. These Standard Sets can be collected by all providers as an essential set of baseline patient characteristics for risk adjustment.

Some key ideas which were raised during this conference were the importance of putting the patient at the centre of the discussion processes, necessity of standardization of outcome measures; and maintaining collection of good quality data with the influx of real world data collection. Redesigning services and implementing scalable value-based healthcare solutions were shared by keynote speakers from various European Health Ministries, insurance providers and healthcare services experts.

As part of multi-stakeholder dialogue sessions and workshops (hosted by Humana and EIT Health Belgium and Netherlands), the aims of DIGIPHARM to create medical information infrastructure and to enable trust in outcomes for healthcare reimbursement, was well received.

DIGIPHARM have focused on the ability to develop a platform to facilitate the processing of outcomes-based agreements for health technologies and healthcare services at high volumes.

While there have been many different VBHC initiatives in recent times there has been no real solution that allows the scalability of the implementation of Value Based pricing agreements, with the use standard patient reported outcome models (PROMS). Electronic health records (EHRs) do not always contain structured data fields for outcomes, as such having ICHOM proposed PROMs or other standardised measurements might be required for a future standardised value-based models.

The automation of smart Hyperledger contracts on blockchain ensures security, quality and traceability bears some promise to achieve the aims set by many stakeholders, and will potentially disrupt healthcare systems in a positive way.