Tino Martí
In the 2018 edition of the Mobile World Congress has drawn to a close. Among the different technologies exhibited this week at the mobile fair, the chain of blocks or blockchain has appeared tangentially. Announced as the new revolution in the digital world - which some consider as disruptive as the internet - the block chain is the technology that allows the popular bitcoin crypto currency to work and whose value has reached unimaginable value (exceeded $ 18,000 last December).
But what is really the block chain and how can it be of interest to the readers of Advances in Clinical Management?
Blockchain is a distributed database system that allows transactions between agents to be both secure and anonymous by means of a trusted timestamp in the distributed public registry (distributed ledger). Although its best known application is to carry out operations with cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or ethereum, the chain of blocks can also be used to manage valuable elements such as certificates, insurance or votes, and is being widely experienced in different sectors such as finance, logistics or food.
In the health sector, the block chain may have different applications, although they are all in currently in an embryonic state. The most predictable application will be to facilitate the exchange of data between different health information systems (electronic medical records), while providing the patient with greater control over their data and solving the persistent problem of the unique identifier. The MedRec initiative of the MIT Media Lab represents a good example both of its potential and of its incipient state.
Towards crypto management
Could the characteristics of the block chain be transferred (exchanging value safely, anonymously and distributed, without anyone exercising central control) to the world of management?
From a theoretical perspective or based on experience in the management of traditional health organizations, it seems quite tricky and deviant, unless they apply to small self-organized groups within hierarchical structures.
However, Jordi Varela put us on the track of the splendid book by Frédéric Laloux Reinventing organizations, which formally bases the possibility of managing organizations with distributed leaderships and illustrates it with different experiences among which stands Buurtzorg, the Dutch organization specialized in home care.
The imperative of collaboration among organizations as a source of innovation, which was exposed in several papers at the Mobile World Congress and the application and development of the block chain to facilitate coordination in ecosystems with multiple agents, promises to be a breeding ground for new modes of organization where the central command is neither central nor in commando and management is hidden within and throughout the system.
If you know a little and want to know more:
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