Prep Questions - Assistance Needed

#1

I have been scheduled to speak on blockchain and the “New Internet” - Elastos with the CEO of the Caring Health Center which is one of the largest healthcare providers in my local region. Medicine is not my area of expertise so I’m seeking help from the community in preparing for a few questions.

  1. How can blockchain help the medical industry.

  2. How can Elastos benefit health care providers.

  3. What is the most impactful part of Elastos on medicine.

If anyone with hands on knowledge of the medical space can post a few answers to these questions that would help alot. Thanks

Peace & Love
Famous Amos

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#2

Hi @amos1994, glad to see you back on track :muscle:

I think Elastos can help in the file storages and secure channel communication between health centers. For example here, when I go to any hospital I have to go through the whole registration process every single time. It would be much more easier for me and the hospital to simply allow them to access my data. As a patient, I accept to share my data with the hospital in a secure way. We could make it so that the data can not be sent elsewhere, the doctor would be allowed to add data to my file and I would remain the owner. I can access it on my phone and it is easy to know what diseases I had in the past.

Another way would be to setup an anonymous help line for people. I have a health question but I don’t want to face judgement I could be set in contact with a nurse and receive advice knowing that I remain unidentified. It’d be even cooler with voice call.

As for the precise questions, you laid down. I suggest to take the problem in reverse, questions could be :

What are the pains in the medical industry ?
What are the pains for health care providers ?

Starting from there, your and our collective Elastos knowledge can come and bring solutions.

Peace

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#3

Disclaimer: I know very little of the medical industry. Just making some guesses from other things I have read.

  1. Reduce friction/infrastructure by helping record medical information in a secure and universally accessible manner. Sharing information between different medical institutes seems like a complicated and possibly insecure process. If a patients medical information was stored on-chain, any medical institute could easily query the blockchain and obtain the necessary information. I think a consortium chain would be more appropriate. It could also allow patients to take control of their medical data if they so choose. DID could be incorporated. May need some sort of privacy preserving features like TEE.

  2. There are also possible applications having to do with medical research. Sharing research or multi-agency research collaboration efforts could be improved.
    https://medium.com/@iainbarclay/using-blockchain-for-secure-information-sharing-296ced023481

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#4

Maybe you get an idea from the article below
[12/03, 11:59] ∆™: “How Blockchain Technology Can Accelerate Stem Cell Research” by Mina Down https://link.medium.com/TUT4g3RkZU
[12/03, 12:07] ∆™: “TOP Network Testnet 2.0 Goes Live, Embracing Dapps on Smart Contracts” by TOP Network Official Account https://link.medium.com/cwQKDUplZU

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#5

Hey I’m a nurse and getting patient records is very difficult. In NZ we have different regions, if a patient moves from region a to b then b may not be able to access the patients records from region a. Similarly, if a patient has records at there primary health care provider, or in a private hospital, then as a nurse in the public hospital I may not be able to access there information.

Another point,in NZ only healthcare workers that are directly involved with a patient should be able to access there records. I e if I’m not looking after patient John Smith then I should not access his records, but I am able to, if I did however I am in big trouble. With elastos of you could make it so only staff x,y and z are allowed to access records would be beneficial.

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#6

A Digital Supply Chain solution connecting manufacturers, transportation companies, hospitals and users may be one of the most fitting scenarios for blockchain, because on a public ledger you can record all information about a specific product and consumers also benefit in ways such as making sure the product is not a counterfeit. In addition, each product may receive an own DID and a chip or RFID that records data for example if the product has been kept in conditions that lower the effect of the medicine itself, for example exposure to high temperature. In that way, anyone along the supply chain can verify if the product is still usable.

It is important to remember that Elastos is a public blockchain and health data of people are very sensitive, therefore I would rather focus on products and logistics.

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#7

but can they implement private blockchain as a sidechain for those sensitive data?

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#8

  1. I think right now getting medical records off centralized servers is paramount. A person’s medical record is worth 10x more than a cc # on the dark web. Hospitals are getting servers hacked on a regular basis and all patient health records are being stolen or held until a ransom ($millions) is paid. There are a lot of other projects that want to do this, but I think they involve having the patient being solely reponsible for their medical record and they hold their private key 24/7. Not sure how this could work. I like the idea of DID and digitizing a patients record as an asset. But how would that work moving it between the patient and the heathcare provider(s)? Maybe have an expiration on the record? Even if the records were stored on Elastos Hive, how would the healthcare provider access them unless they had the private key (probably stored centrally lol).

  2. Based on my experience, the IT cost of healthcare providers is, in a word, insane. The amount spent annually surely could be decreased using Elastos carrier and also add security. Where to start with this is anyone’s guess. I’m not an IT professional, I just know what it costs. Someone with more tech knowledge can probably answer on how to tackle this.

  3. I think one of the most impactful might be medical equipment. Going along with the IT security issues I talked about in the first question, there are a ton of vulnerabilities with medical equipment due to unsupported OS’s. It takes manufacturers years to get their products approved by the FDA. Once approved and then sold to healthcare facilities, Microsoft has already begun to move to a new OS and the support letters start coming in that the equipment’s OS is unsupported. “IF” an OS upgrade is available for the device(remember, must be approved by FDA) this is usually very expensive ($thousands) for each device. So I think if manufacturers would adopt Elastos as their OS, this would solve these issues. But you would also need an EMR (electronic medical record) solution that used elastos and then stored the info in a decentralized manner using HIVE. This could be the ultimate healthcare solution lol. But we are a ways off from this obviously.

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#9

One example could be autonomus monitoring for medical devices.(glucose meters, holters, blood pressure meters, body temperature)

IOT is future so i imagine it like every medical device at home or at hospital interacts with carrier, with your own DID device could know who you are and your health informations are safe, easy accessible for your doctor, anytime anywhere.

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#10

Amazing, thank you brother <3

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#11

Honestly, I’ve never been bullish on the healthcare industry and any moving technology, especially in notetaking.

As a medical professional, myself, I’ve seen radiology clinics still use faxes as a standard. CD, at best. The industry moves very slow in regards to record keeping. Hell, I use paper notes myself because it’s much safer, simpler, and secure and reliable.

Getting doctors to change their methods is a huge challenge, so I would say that having digital assets that are signatures for insurance companies to use as records is the best approach. Insurance companies are designed to deny care, and they often do so by “losing” paperwork and “asking” for it again. For both the patient and the insurance company, having an immutable ledger makes a lot of sense that everyone can resource, but GOOD LUCK getting adoption, lol.

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#12

Hi @amos1994, could you give us an update ? How did it go ?

Thanks !

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