Ask The Doctor startup, which carries out medical counseling online, became the first medical company to accept payments in bitcoin.
According to the startup, this innovation is aimed to protect patients' anonymity. Paying for services in bitcoin, customers can secure sensitive information from the third persons such as banks, for example. New means of payment is available on the website, the mobile version is coming soon.
“Many of our users ask extremely sensitive questions from teenage pregnancy to STD's to drug use that they are too afraid to go to their own doctor’s office to get help for. On top of that, many users don’t want their family members to know. While it does take some extra effort to have complete anonymity using Bitcoin, it’s certainly a large improvement over a credit card,” commented the head of the company Prakash Chand.
Ask The Doctor has been providing medical advisory since 2010 and the number of the processed inquiries has exceeded 5 mln. In September, in order to expand the clientele, the company started translating medical library in foreign languages, and also added five additional currencies to its basket.
It is noteworthy that UnitedPharmacies online shop has recently become bitcoin-friendly too. The online pharmacy offers a 10% discount for bitcoin customers. All due warnings are made though concerning the risks of dealing with the cryptocurrency.
Meanwhile, the year 2016 has opened up a variety of possibilities to use the distributed register technology for medical purposes. On 3 October, Hyperledger announced creation of a working group aiming to launch a viable decentralized system to exchange medical data. Presently, it will focus on discovery and exploration of healthcare-related blockchain use cases that address real-world problems and are impossible to replace and the ways to avoid overlapping with other existing solutions.
In April 2016, under the auspices of Hyperledger project, Accenture, a multinational consulting services company, presented a project of distributed time-stamping and blockchain tracking of drugs. According to the company’s lead software developer Primrose Mbanefo, if the project is implemented, it could help to raise quality control excluding from circulation not only illegally produced drugs, but even those made by well-established companies that do not stick to the formula well enough. It would finally provide healthcare with “a supply chain we could actually trust.”
Another medical project based on the distributed ledger was presented in May by the UAE-based telecom provider du and Estonian company Guardtime. The partners plan to put all health records in the UAE in a distributed ledger. It is supposed to reduce paperwork, increase the security of health records and give medical professionals access to up-to-date patient profiles.
(c) Coinfox