In 2016, the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology sponsored a white paper national contest to generate promising blockchain use cases in health care, especially in support of the Triple Aim and interoperability. The contest produced many interesting white papers, some of which are reviewed here. The ONC also sponsored a national “code-a-thon,” ending in March, 2017, in which software developers provided proofs of concept and hopefully ground-breaking blockchain code to help accelerate its application in the health care industry. The ONC will share these results later in 2017.
Concurrently, vendors such as IBM, the Tierion/Philips partnership (Netherlands), Brontech (Australia), GEM (U.S.), and Guardtime (Europe) have been developing their own conceptual blockchain applications. It is interesting to note that consulting firms and other companies are hiring blockchain analysts and technicians in anticipation of accelerating blockchain development projects. Historically, IBM has contributed approximately half of the blockchain open source code; the percentage of non-IBM code continues to increase from contributions of 122 blockchain development community members (Groenfeldt, 2017).
