Inside Healthcare’s Slow Bet on Blockchain

Supply chains are adopting it first; operating rooms may follow, slowly

7 Jan 2026

Blockchain is back in healthcare, but with its ambitions trimmed. Instead of promising to remake the operating room, advocates now present it as a backstage tool: one that could, in time, make data safer, records harder to alter and coordination easier in complex clinical settings.

What works today is far from surgery. The clearest progress is in pharmaceutical supply chains. Networks such as MediLedger help drugmakers, distributors and hospitals comply with America’s Drug Supply Chain Security Act by sharing tamper-resistant records. The appeal is plain. When many parties must trust the same data, a shared ledger can improve accountability without handing control to one firm.

That experience is shaping how hospitals think about the next step. Operating rooms are data-heavy and unforgiving places. Knowing the origin of a device, responding quickly to recalls and ensuring accurate documentation all matter. Some hospital leaders see blockchain as a way to manage surgical supplies or track high-value equipment. Yet these ideas remain conceptual. No one is rushing to install distributed ledgers beside the anaesthetist.

Another attraction is data integrity. Hospitals still struggle to share clinical information across fragmented systems without raising cyber risks. Researchers and technology firms are exploring whether blockchain could help manage access rights and verify that data have not been altered, especially in tightly regulated environments. Regulators, including the FDA, have joined research projects on traceability and oversight. They have not, however, endorsed blockchain for routine clinical use.

Large technology firms are content to experiment. IBM and others are building permission-based systems designed to meet healthcare rules. The emphasis is on governance, interoperability and compliance, not deployment. That caution reflects reality. Hospital IT systems are old, messy and difficult to integrate.

The obstacles are familiar. Blockchains can struggle to scale. Linking them to legacy software is costly. Aligning them with regulation is slow. Perhaps hardest is governance: deciding who controls what in a setting where many stakeholders share responsibility but few share incentives.

For now, blockchain’s place in the operating room is preparatory. Its promise lies less in dramatic transformation than in quiet groundwork, strengthening trust and transparency so that, if hospitals choose to rely on shared data more deeply, the infrastructure is ready. The opportunity for hospital leaders is not speed, but patience.