Is blockchain the answer to America's opioid crisis?

A blockchain-based start-up that believes it has a solution to help ensure patients are given the right medication has been accepted onto the MassChallenge Accelerator in Texas.

BlockMedx is an e-prescribing platform that uses predictive analytics for physicians, pharmacists and patients to help manage controlled drug prescriptions. The company states that the use of blockchain enables the creation of a completely private distributed database of prescription data.

The company has now been accepted onto the MassChallenge Accelerator, which looks for promising start-ups and offers rewards including half a million dollars in grants and bespoke mentoring.

BlockMedx is carving out its own niche within the healthcare related blockchain market. Michael J. Brunner, CEO of BlockMedx, said:

“We are taking a different approach than many of those that are trying to do complete medical records on the blockchain. Those projects generally need to pull existing data from legacy electronic medical records (EMRs) to have a viable business model. Unfortunately, there are serious interoperability limitations with these systems that are proving a high barrier to overcome. We are focusing on prescription drugs, a very addressable and feasible market to tackle. E-prescribing is a growing market, with a large wave of adoption coming; especially in controlled substances as EPCS becomes mandated by law in an ever-growing number of states.”

The company’s platform could even be used to help control the growing opioid crisis in the US. As the world’s largest consumer of opioids, the US currently spends over $75 billion in tackling the current crisis. The crisis is furthered by how individual states in the US create their own prescription drug monitoring programmes and also that there is no interoperable system of opioid prescription monitoring in the country.

It’s estimated that if electronic prescribing for controlled substances with access to a database of comprehensive medication history were required across every state, then the US could save up to $53 billion every year.

“We are looking to provide physicians with better decision-making capabilities. BlockMedx will offer a more comprehensive profile on patients to make sure patients are being given the right prescription options,” added Dr. Brunner.