By leveraging the blockchain technology, the startup will be able to offer secure access to health data, thus benefiting care providers, patients, and researchers.
Healthcare development, as of today, is being hindered by such challenges as medical fraud and health data interoperability. Medical information is currently disjointed and stored across multiple platforms, what not only prevents holistic care, but causes serious privacy concerns.
Besides, patients still need to communicate with different doctors, meet with them at different locations and exchange physical records. The lack of common regulations for secure transfer of medical data as well as the use of outdated software makes the industry susceptible to data breach and identity theft. These issues lead to medical errors and higher cost of data access, which, in turn, slows down medical research and prevents human health advancement.
Currently, there are already several projects that work on addressing these problems. However, they are targeted only at certain participants. A large number of healthcare systems, together with political and social obstacles, make it extremely difficult to transform the current system.
Healthbase was launched three years ago with an aim of developing its own software that would aggregate all health-related data. The solution has since been trialed in two medical care centers in Germany and received positive feedback, but it still lacked security and trust.
After discovering the blockchain technology in 2017, the team has developed a new concept that is expected to solve these problems. The new solution, which combines modern information technology and blockchain, will provide an easy and safe access to medical records for researchers, care providers, and patients.
As the company describes in its blog post, the solution involves three steps:
- At first, it provides patients and care providers with blockchain apps to access and control medical records. This allows the company to gather and securely keep all health-related data.
- Then, all records are aggregated for their target use cases
- And lastly, the system gives users a secure and easy access to data via the app. Access rights belong to the individual, but can be shared with care providers and sold to medical researchers.
As far as benefits for patients, they will be able to easily monitor their medical data via a smartphone app and earn money or get free services by selling their data to researchers. Meantime, care providers can easily check their patients’ health data and view medical studies. Besides, every time patients sell data, money also goes to their doctors.
The platform will let researchers to access high-quality health data and sell their studies to other researchers. By offering an access to high-quality health data, healthbase aims to improve medicine research, diagnoses, and therapies for patients.
To drive further development of the project, healthbase is planning to start an ICO in the first quarter of 2018. Although the technical details are still in development, the project has already gained substantial interest among the medical and blockchain communities in Germany.
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