A New Era of Personal Healthcare Record (PHR) Arrives with MediBloc
“The hospital-centric method of keeping and sharing your medical record data can now be safely decentralized through blockchain technology.”
MediBloc is a blockchain startup that is creating an ecosystem where medical records can be securely kept safely and transferred by their rightful owners, the patients and not the hospitals. Its co-founders are both professional doctors with a computer science background who realized the issues and limitations on medical record handling could be resolved through blockchain technology. Dr. Allen Wookyun Kho, a dental surgeon, previously worked at Samsung Electronics as a software engineer. Dr. Eunsol Lee, a radiologist, is also a data scientist with experience in analyzing medical data.
MediBloc is the world’s first company to merge blockchain technology onto a PHR platform. MediBloc has already developed a demo-app with the official version to be released in October 2018.
“The healthcare industry is larger than the electronic appliances industry, but the medical data system is lagging big time,” said Dr. Kho. “MediBloc allows individuals to take control of their medical records. Institutions will no longer be at the center of medical data handling.”
Dr. Kho pointed out:
“Hospital visits create a sizable amount of medical data regarding various diagnosis', treatments, and prescriptions. Under the current medical data system, the patient cannot collect his or her medical records easily. Patients, institutions, and doctors are all paying unnecessary costs under the current data management system.”
For example, a patient may have to take the same blood and x-ray tests again when he or she changes from hospital A to hospital B. A patient may also have to revisit and pay the hospital to issue a medical report. Patients are often the victims of this extra cost with the current record keeping system.
This leads to a lot of problems, since doctors may have trouble providing an appropriate treatment if a patient incorrectly communicates their medical history. Medical researchers can only have limited access to medical record data due to private data protection laws.
MediBloc believes blockchain technology is the key to solving this problem. Blockchain, the core technology behind crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Qtum, helps ensure credibility in digital data. Unlike existing institutions who save transaction records on a centralized server, blockchain distributes transaction records to all network users and has a distributed validation mechanism. Data forgery and hacking can thus be prevented while ensuring transparency and credibility.
Dr. Kho stated, “blockchain’s credibility, transparency, and security have already been proven by the crypto-currencies currently being used throughout the world. MediBloc is developing a next-generation medical data system that fully utilizes blockchain’s benefits.”
Like the miners of bitcoin, MediBloc participants record medical data on Medi Token (MED) blockchain. MED will be the crypto-currency used as a reward in the MediBloc ecosystem.
The Medi Token (MED) can be used to compensate practitioners when they produce new medical data for a patient and researchers can directly purchase medical research data from individual patients.
Dr. Kho explained, “Upon a patient’s approval, healthcare providers can input medical data into the MediBloc system and receive Medi tokens (MED). Individuals, institutions, and corporations can purchase data on a specific illness or from a specific environment with the consent of individual users through MED.”
MediBloc plans to operate in Korea and China first and then go global. MediBloc has formed a partnership with Seum law firm for legal advice and is working closely with Qtum, a blockchain application platform.
Dr. Kho added, “There is a global social consensus around changing the PHR paradigm. However, the medical insurance system differs from country-to-country, and each system is extremely complicated. This is why we are targeting Korea and China first which is more familiar to us.”
“People may think to change the paradigm of PHR is too ambitious for a startup. However, MediBloc aims to become the game changer in the healthcare industry. We believe MediBloc will contribute to making a win-win strategy for patients and doctors in the healthcare service industry.”
Website: medibloc.org
WeChat Official Accounts: mediblocchina
Telegram: medibloc/medibloc-china
