New Blockchain-based startups create new opportunities for healthcare

By Amelia Tomasicchio - November 09, 2017 (cointelegraph.com)

Blockchain technology has huge potential to disrupt a wide range of industries, ranging from data management, security and healthcare as a few examples.

The Blockchain can provide a new foundation and structure for health information management by making electronic medical records more efficient, without intermediaries and empowering patients to be the owners of their own records.

This way, a Blockchain-backed health information platform will be able to unlock the important value of interoperability and in turn, provide a reduction in costs to health providers and patients alike.

Hyperledger for a doctor-to-patient platform

The Medicalchain platform aims to utilize the Blockchain to improve health record storage. The different institutions such as doctors, hospitals, laboratories, research and health insurers will be able to request permission to access a patient’s record in order to provide their services and record transactions on the ledger.

Medicalchain is going to partner with Civic: this will facilitate one of the ways in which doctors will be able to onboard themselves by using the Civic application integrated into Medicalchain.

This is a more secure and reliable way of enlisting doctors because they need to be verified and their license to operate has to be checked. Mo Tayeb, co-founder at Medicalchain explains to Cointelegraph:

“Blockchain technology is set to change the way healthcare is managed forever. Blockchain allows for clinicians and patients alike to be confident that the medical records are accurate and up-to-date as the distributed ledger guarantees an incorruptible, trustless version of the data which can be depended upon at any given time. An indisputable single version of the truth is not achievable with today's current systems and infrastructure.”

Medicalchain uses the Hyperledger Fabric, built by The Linux Foundation in collaboration with a few companies including IBM.  

US market is special

Patientory claims it has a solution that aims at creating a patient-centered platform designed with the main goal of eliminating pain points in the centralized healthcare environments and allows interactions with health IT infrastructures in order to improve themselves with the changing trends in healthcare management.

There are a few differences between the two companies, related to business, targets and technology.

Medicalchain is not seeking to partner with hospitals and healthcare organizations, but instead is approaching the patients directly and offering for them to have their records on their platform regardless of which healthcare organization they belong to.

Also, Patientory seems to be more focused on the US market, while Medicalchain wants to cover the entire world.

However, in both cases, the objective is that by giving patients control over their health data, it will empower them to better manage their care, thanks to the Blockchain.

Permissioned Blockchain: a contradiction in terms?

Disrupting healthcare or any other industry would only be possible with the use of Blockchain technology, but this is based on the principle of complete decentralization and not with a permissioned network such as the one designed by Hyperledger.

Is this a contradiction in thought and process?

Mo Tayeb explained to us why his company decided to use a private chain like Hyperledger: “Using Hyperledger, Medicalchain will allow patients to control permissions to their health records - who gets access to them, what information they get access to and for how long.  It also allows for health stuff to trust the integrity of the medical records as patients will only have ‘read only’ access whereas certified and verified clinicians will be given ‘read and write’ permission.”