The first quarter of 2018 saw healthcare data breaches impacting over one million consumers, patients, and health care plan members. With IT and hacking incidents one of the major causes of these breaches, patients and providers alike are eager to find more secure solutions for their data.
Enter Patientory, a blockchain solution based out of Atlanta, Georgia, that plans to provide a secure means to store and share Electronic Health Records (EHR) between patients and providers. By using secure and encrypted blockchain technology and streamlining storage solutions for date, Patientory hopes to revolutionize the way we share medical records.
Patientory’s comprehensive whitepaper describes the company’s to provide a “peer-to-peer EMR record” on blockchain technology. According to Patientory, the currently-used, legacy software that physicians and providers use to store patient data can lead to frustration among medical providers.
Because of various inefficiencies and technological problems, it’s difficult for doctors to strike a balance between interacting with patients and reporting accurately on their data. In fact, Patientory suggests that frustrating record-keeping methods might have something to do with high percentages of burnout in the field: between 2011 and 2014, doctors’ burnout rate has increased from 45 to 54%.
And readmissions are a serious and costly issue in hospitals, often caused by inefficient and outdated methods of communicating patient data.
These issues is compounded by the growing anxiety about health care breaches in the industry. With data cyber-security data breach lapses alarmingly high (and expensive), it’s clear that current solutions for EMR storage just aren’t cutting it.
What’s the Patientory solution?
Patientory’s solution is to allow the transfer of medical records between physicians and patients in a much easier, more transparent, and more secure way.
It works with providers’ pre-existing EHR systems to create an all-in-one solution: patients and their providers can communicate health information through Patientory’s secure platform. They describe themselves as a “bridge” that can effectively connect healthcare record-keeping platforms. Their goal is to help streamline and secure health data transmission processes to create better transparency for consumers, make doctors’ jobs easier, and keep data more secure using blockchain technology.
Patientory aims to help patients, providers, and healthcare organizations
1. Patients
Patientory offers a powerful resource to patients who want to be more connected to their health care records. Especially for those with chronic diseases like diabetes, access to health records will allow patients to keep tabs on their health and therefore have greater accountability, access, and control over their health.
And even for those consumers with a one-time medical issue like a surgery or procedure, Patientory allows patients a way to quickly and effortlessly communicate to providers through their own individual profile.
2. Providers
Medical professionals using Patientory will be able to record, store, and transmit secure medical information in a more streamlined way. It also helps connect them to other healthcare providers in the patients’ network, allowing them to enjoy a more interconnected network and provide the best quality medical care to their patients. It will even allow providers to chat with patients or one another through HIPAA-compliant messaging system.
3. Healthcare Organizations
Many healthcare organizations are rightly concerned about data breaches. By using Patientory’s blockchain technology to store and transmit records, organizations can put some of the concerns about data safety in the hands of experts, rather than using valuable resources preventing and recovering from costly breaches.
Why Blockchain?
Ease and security: Dash, BlockCyper, and Patientory Blockchain Network
Patientory is unique in that it hopes to integrate its own private blockchain technology with the public blockchain technologies developed by Dash and BlockCypher. Users can use Dash “wallets” to transfer payments, while BlockCypher’s APIs make for swift and secure transmission of records.
In addition, they will use their own private blockchain technology. Patientory Blockchain Network will allow for HIPAA-compliant, secure, and decentralized records using algorithms that are fully compliant with NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology).
According to Patientory, health care information will be “shredded and encrypted” through their inter-operable blockchain network, making it extremely unlikely for it to be hacked or accessed inappropriately.
Cryptocurrency: the PTOY token
Though patients will be given a certain amount of free storage for health records with, Patientory’s PTOY tokens will allow them to purchase more data for storage. Interestingly, Patientory proposes a merit-based system in which healthcare participants can be rewarded for better care with PTOY currency. In additio, PTOY can also be used to execute smart transactions in health care organizations.
Patientory hopes to offer a solution to legacy models of storing and sharing medical information that create an undue burden on physicians, make it difficult for patients to offer their medical information, and contribute to costly health care data breaches.
Their decentralized blockchain network and powerful encryption standards should make them an amazing assets for patients, providers, and organizations alike.
