Susanne Somerville is the CEO of Chronicled, builders of enterprise blockchain solutions for the life sciences and healthcare industry. In this podcast Susanne introduced us to both Chronicled and to MediLedger whilst sharing some insights on how they are tackling some of the inefficiencies in the US healthcare system.

You will also hear about some of her learnings about the differences of launching blockchain solutions based on regulatory compliance compared to one of ROI.

Susanne’s prior experience is in the life sciences where she ran supply chain for pharmaceutical and biotech companies like Genentech and Hoffman LaRoche.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a decentralised ledger that can keep record of transactions or data exchanges. Because of its decentralised nature, no individual party can change the data of the recorded transactions or the rules that blockchain is enforcing. For Susanne it is the magic in this decentralisation and immutability that makes a lot of things possible for enterprises that weren’t possible before.

 

What is the state of US healthcare industry and how digitised, connected and standardised is it?

Photograph by Robert Kaufmann

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the US National health spending is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 5.4 percent for 2019-28 and to reach $6.2 trillion by 2028.

In comparison to many other countries the US healthcare system is private, which has spurred on a lot of innovation. Due to that a lot of the innovation was done on an individual level, creating many disparate systems across the country. Susanne’s experience is that US healthcare companies are analogue native instead of digital. A lot is still being done on paper and on fax machines. All of this has contributed to create a disconnected US healthcare industry.

A recent report mentioned that even in exciting technology such as AI (artificial intelligence) there was only a 2% adoption rate of it in the US healthcare industry.

 

Chronicled & MediLedger

Chronicled is based out of San Francisco and it has been tackling connecting the physical to the digital world since 2014. They were looking at a variety of industry use cases and found a sweet spot in the life sciences. In 2017 they launched the MediLedger project to bring together industry leaders to see how blockchain could play a role in meeting regulations and fixing a lot of the issues in their industry.

Since 2017, the project has morphed into the MediLedger Network. Chronicle is the builder of the software solution and is the custodian of the network. The consortium members of MediLedger run the infrastructure and the solution so that they have control over how the network grows.

 

Building the MediLedger consortium

Susanne recognises that building the consortium at the beginning wasn’t easy but they did benefit from a couple of key points:

* Credibility: The Chronicled team had both the deep industry expertise and the technological capability

* Regulation: the Drug Supply Chain Security Act that requires an electronic interoperable system by 2023 to m...