Opinion: Blockchains and health care: promising and moving quickly, though no silver bullet

The buzz about opportunities for blockchains in the health care and pharmaceutical industries continues to ramp up. This technology can give us new tools to secure medical information, track pharmaceutical supply chains, and more. While blockchains have promise, they are not a panacea for health care.

Make no mistake: We are excited about the opportunity to use blockchains in our industry. Earlier this year, we launched Elektra Labs, a venture backed by a National Science Foundation I-Corps grant to develop a more secure system to share and verify health information. To build our first prototype, our team worked with the MIT Media Lab and Ethereum, a blockchain-based platform that was barely a year old.

Although there are many potential applications for health care blockchains, we worry that the heavy jargon and media hype has caused a lot of confusion about how