Personal Healthcare Information Ecosystem, built on blockchain
Healthcare is everything. Outside of food, water and shelter, one can argue that access to healthcare has played an immense role in the advancement of our life expectancy. Yet, it shouldn’t come to you as a surprise that the healthcare industry and their processes, are in many ways, inefficient and dated.
Remember the last time you had to call your doctor to request medical records? A study from University of Michigan, published by Stanford Medicine highlights the friction we experience in healthcare simply because patient records can’t be shared across clinics.
Patients were 59 percent less likely to have a redundant CT scan, 44 percent less likely to get a duplicate ultrasound, and 67 percent less likely to have a repeated chest X-ray when both their emergency visits were at hospitals that shared information across an [health information exchange].
Scattered health records lead to far worse problems than healthcare redundancies, but changing healthcare is no small task. This is where our head is at.
The team at MediBloc understands the importance of HIPAA Compliance (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), which accounts for the security and privacy of patient information in the US. We’re designing a healthcare data management platform built on blockchain technology. This ultimately allows patients to be the center of information. They hold and control their medical records, providers access and update information with patient consent. This reduces redundancies, administrative tasks, delays in patient health, inaccurate diagnosis all the while insuring the security and privacy of patient information.
Blockchain Disruption in Healthcare
Blockchain technology facilitates trust and validates identity; removing the need for intermediate third parties. This protects individual privacy, increases data integrity, and creates internet of value.
In plain English, the underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum can be applied to private patient medical data. These records which were previously, outdated, silo’d and unaccessible by the patients can now be securely stored and managed by the individual not a central entity (ie: your provider, medical clinic etc). Blockchain can bring data interoperability into the healthcare industry like never before.
MediBloc
MediBloc’s healthcare information platform is a personal data ecosystem for patients, providers and researchers, built on blockchain technology. Our mission is to:
Streamline medicine for patients, providers and researchers by redistributing value behind personal healthcare data ownership.
Through MediBloc, you can effectively own your medical data, providers can remove redundancies to provide better care, and your valuable data can help researchers push the advancement of medicine faster than ever.
Own your Medical Data
Today, your medical records are managed and owned by your physicians and their clinics. That’s fine if you only see one doctor for the rest of your life, but think of the last time you had to go see a specialized physician, or when you moved. Your own medical records are scattered and requesting for that information takes days, sometimes weeks, delaying patient care that you should be getting.
Blockchain technology, allows for unpresented security and privacy. So effectively, an app on our platform can finally hold, store, and update all of your medical records in one place. Think, a digital healthcare wallet, if you will.
Imagine walking into a clinic and your provider will request access for your medical health records on MediBloc. The moment you sign off, they will have the entirety of your medical history, organized and time stamped. Every conversation you had with a provider, every note they had taken, every prescription you’ve gotten, every prescription you’ve refilled. Every x-ray, lab tests, physicals you’ve gotten will be readily accessible.
Remove redundancies to provide better care
Examples of ineffeciencies in medicine negatively impacting patient care is abundant. Just misdiagnose alone causes hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, in the U.S. alone.
…nearly one-third of the $2.7 trillion spent each year on health care in the U.S. are considered to be wasted dollars.
Evan Falchuk continues in his paper: The misdiagnosis epidemic, highlighting the first and primary cause for this to be “healthcare fragmentation”.
…our health-care system is greatly fragmented. When there are so many opportunities to delay or misread tests, miscommunicate findings or order the wrong tests in the first place, the odds of getting the right diagnosis and right treatment too often are stacked against the patient.
— Evan Falchuk, vice chairman of Best Doctors, Inc.
It doesn’t stop there. A study published by Annals in Internal Medicine, follows providers in 4 specialaities, examining how they spend their time in the clinic.
Physicians spent 27 percent of their office day on direct clinical face time with patients and spent 49.2 percent of their office day on EHRs and other desk work.
Healthcare must move towards a patient-centric process. Every medical professional from primary care, to ER surgeon, to your neighborhood dentist can have access to clean, standardized, complete, accurate and reliable source of patient history. Fixing patient data fragmentation is the most important step in healthcare innovation and it’s possible on the MediBloc blockchain platform.
Help researchers push the advancement of medicine faster than ever.
The current healthcare data is siloed but you can increase interoperability among data providers and researchers alike. Healthcare data is valuable, but due to security and compliance, access was always limited. With MediBloc, medical data will be secured cryptographically to bring value of personal healthcare data back to the patients. This allows researchers to source a much larger pool of accurate information for their study, incentivizes patients to engage in trade over their records, creating a medical data economy that promotes better research and ultimately better world.
Our Vision for MediBloc
Our vision for MediBloc is an open platform where developers and healthcare professionals alike can collaborate to build applications for the future. Possibilities are endless. With enough patient data and regular activity, we can build automated insurance claims, personalized health reports and maybe even AI-powered Medical Chatbots that help answer some of the most common questions in medicine.
But perhaps the most exciting idea is that “Healthcare Data Trading” is actually feasible now.
Patients who own their medical data can opt-in to sell portions of their private data to researchers, medical professionals and institutions (pharmaceuticals, labs). This pushes research and advancements forward while silmultaneously incentivizing patients to keep their records up-to-date.
The healthcare industry is ripe for disruption. Regulation around privacy, security and policy made it nearly impossible for latitudinal innovation until now. Blockchain represents a fundamental shift in our understanding of data. Join us in our quest in organizing better healthcare information for the patients in metro cities to those living in rural third-world countries with no documented history at all.
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MediBloc is a team of medical professionals, data architects and blockchain technologists. Both founders are computer scientists turned to medicine, turned entrepreneurs.