Today’s traditional healthcare setting categorizes a patient’s medical data, storing pieces of it in different departments, and sometimes at satellite locations. Believe it or not, accessing important health information is difficult for your provider, and even they may have to ask another department for permission to release your healthcare results.
Sometimes your physician has to provide supporting medical evidence, expressing why this information will assist them in determining your diagnosis or improving your treatment. And it’s common that patients incur a fee when signing a medical release form requesting their own medical records.
Clearly, providers and patients alike are experiencing difficulty with accessing healthcare information. Slow access in either direction, interferes with the accuracy and speed at which patients receive cost-effective, high-quality health care.
Healthbase aims to provide a solution to our fragmented healthcare information system by using blockchain technology to store, aggregate and secure medical data on one decentralized database, ensuring safe, easy access to all members of the healthcare team, especially patients.
Try to think of the Healthbase network as a triangle and each angle represents a network member: patients (or only your health data), providers, and researchers. The center of the triangle is the operating unit location, or your unique data-driven, “healthbase.“
“To Err is Human…”
Medical errors are common; miscalculations, typos and miscommunications happen. Electronic medical records (EMRs) continue to help reduce the rate of medical errors, specifically compared to hand written orders. But slip-ups still occur. When people copy over daily progress notes, they may forget to remove a notation that no longer applies to the patient’s current medical status. Fortunately, several checks and balances are in place. Plus, each executed function inside the EMR, is time-stamped with your healthcare team member’s John Hancock!
It’s common for physicians to remotely check-in from their iPhones or laptop, evaluating their patient’s results from another physical location. When laboratory results or other health metrics seem off, some physicians will make additional phone calls to better understand what’s going on. Other healthcare providers may rely on their experience, making assumptions based upon a composite patient profile picture. All these extra steps take time, confuse other healthcare team members, and ultimately frustrate the patient.
Healthbase seeks to reduce medical errors by using blockchain technology to establish a decentralized “healthbase,” storing each patient’s unique data in one place, instead of it being scattered about in separate silos, improving flow of communication in all directions. The mission: to reduce medical mishaps and improve healthcare research and quality of therapies.
The process:
- Collect data ~ Compile all data into one secure location.
- Provide Secure Access ~ All healthcare team members, including patients, can safely and easily access healthcare data-driven information.
- Aggregate ~ Observe trends, group health measurements into sets and provide statistical analysis.
Trading Tokens
Healthbase tokens are a form of crypto-currency, granting each network member the option to trade or sell their cloaked information for more tokens, fiat currency, data, or goods and services. Crytpo-coins seek to level the playing field, distributing rights and access to patients’ anonymized data sets. Token usage benefits everyone, it’s integration is showing improvement in medical research, and ultimately, therapies. Currently, two German dental medical clinics are evaluating this software for use in their daily practice.
Blockchain technology coupled with data encryption secures your data and your identity; healthbase tokens help you leverage your unique anonymized health data sets against the highest bidder, allowing you to choose which researchers and other third-parties you share your information with.
Re-Envisioning Research
The beautifully designed, crypto-veil of blockchain technology may drive the information age forward, giving people the power to decide if they want to profit off their own healthcare infographics. In regards to Healthbase, how their tokens are divided amongst patients, providers and researchers remains yet unclear; and distribution parameters may change the degrees of our neatly drawn triangle.
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Brennan is a blockchain technical adviser in the healthcare sector and blockchain entrepreneur who has worked on developing proprietary concepts for both artificial intelligence and enterprise blockchain. He is a graduate of Rutgers University School of Health Professions where he earned a M.S. in biomedical informatics.
