Scientific advancements and the implementation of latest technology has changed the landscape of healthcare. While the concept of personalized medicine and other cutting-edge treatments turns into reality, there is a lot left to be desired when it comes to managing medical data and patient information.
The Healthcare Information Technology presently implemented across the world is broken, irrespective of whether they are used by the government or privately-run hospitals. According to reports, the existing health information technology infrastructure in US hospitals suffer a severe lag that puts it behind every other industry segment by at least a decade, both in terms of hardware and software architecture.
The Electronic Medical Records (EMR), a crucial element in healthcare technology stores personal health information and patient records. The use of outdated technology has put the private information of millions of patients in jeopardy. There have been numerous instances where hospitals and insurance systems have come under attack, crippling the entire system for days while compromising health records in the process. The latest such attack, etched in everyone’ minds is the WannaCry ransomware, that locked computers in more than 150 countries.
To make things worse, the vital healthcare data we pay hospitals and doctors to collect also presents a strong case of double spendings such as duplicate blood test and MRI scans, which end up sitting in silos and fragmented across disparate systems.
Within the next five to ten years, healthcare will be going through a major transformation, led by the consumer. Disruption is coming to healthcare one way or another. Combined with new care delivery services such as remote monitoring, telemedicine, doctor-on-demand, and population health, a new platform must be created to coordinate health information exchange in open, fluid, and secure manner anywhere in the world.
Time Has Come for the Healthcare Industry to Incorporate Blockchain Technology
Emrify is a healthcare industry innovator with products such as the Personal Health Record (PHR), Drug Facts and Clinical Trials mobile application with thousands of users. Emrify embraces emerging technology and is not shy about showcasing it. They are a frequent participant in health hackathons, with multiple wins under their belt. These events offer a platform for Emrify to showcase new solutions while maintaining a deep understanding of the challenges at hand.
Emrify has constantly been working to identify the cracks in the healthcare industry, to solve the problem of interoperability. The rise of blockchain technology represents a pivotal moment to fix healthcare once and for all. The decentralized model has come to be the focal point for every stakeholder in the entire continuum of health services, especially the unique properties of the Ethereum network which allows, for the first time, for data to be owned and controlled by an individual.
On the one hand, the consensus algorithm used in blockchain based platforms enable the decentralized mechanism to distribute power to the people. While on the other, the same technology can be used to secure identities for privacy and security. Both these qualities are instrumental for the better handling of patient information within the healthcare system.
Leveraging on the technology, Emrify is launching a decentralized Personal Health Record platform. Built over Ethereum blockchain and powered by its native token, the platform aims to collect and lock the healthcare data of users in a secure environment. Users on the platform enjoy complete ownership and control over their data, and they can decide whom they wish to share it with. At the same time, the crypto-economics model surrounding the platform is designed to incentivize data sharing for all parties.
Rising Value of Health Data
The Emrify Health Passport platform is powered by HIT tokens, which stands for Health Information Transfer) and acts as the mode of value exchange within the ecosystem. By strengthening the economy around healthcare data, the HIT tokens stand to create a healthy network effect, which helps in creating more value as the amount of data available for analysis continue to grow.
Healthcare data has over recent years gained the attention of various healthcare stakeholder including providers, insurance, employers, researchers, government, and pharmaceutical companies, given the growing popularity of wearable and increasingly affordable genome sequencing. In the past, companies like IMS Health has been getting rich off the medical data of the public by running a matching algorithm to sell to big pharmaceuticals. Currently, the industry’s major players include the likes of IBM Watson and Google Verily project Baseline, all of which are prime examples of rising value in health data. For the consumer, trust has been broken as they want to free the data and gain more control.
Blockchain Summit, Dubai Blockchain Award
The time has never been better for a PHR platform to connect all the players in the healthcare industry and move the whole segment towards a better future. Emrify will include economic incentives for everyone to grow the ecosystem from day one. For stakeholders, Emrify will provide a trusted place to collect healthcare data straight from the source.
The platform has the potential to alleviate some of the shortcomings in the existing system, like the $80 billion annual cost of insurance fraud by enhancing the claim verification mechanism. Similarly, it helps individuals protect their own data while choosing to share or sell it to others on their own terms.
Emrify recently participated in the Blockchain Summit, Dubai Blockchain Awards, where they presented a pitch on solutions for sharing emergency health information. Emrify is also entering into a partnership with Encrypgen, which provides next-generation blockchain security for the protection, sharing and re-marketing of genomic data.
More information about Emrify is available at – https://www.emrify.com/ .