Overview
Data is money. Every big company out there is mining and analysing the data so they customise the product and content that they offer specifically for the test out the user. How does it help specifically in the medical field ? Electronic Medical Records help keep track of the medical history and the information of the patient so that they can be accessed by more than one medical company. Through this when a patient walks into a hospital ,the doctor can identify the patients Medical history ,past medications , allergies etc on the fly.
EHR adaption rates are catching up in USA and in other countries as well. The stats show the number of physicians using EHR is on constant rise from 2012.
Courtesy: practicefusion.com
Currently there are more than 1200 EMR providers. But the problem here is that the patient doesn’t own the data . Medichain also aims to store the data off-chain meaning that doctors can access the data regardless of the vendor EHR used.
Medichain
Medichain aims to put the ownership of the data which is ofcourse very valuable and sensitive in the hands of the owner .There is an excellent article on why data is money, you can read it here.
Medichain will allow every patient to have a pointer in blockchain through which all the records about the history ,be it going to a doctor or buying some medicine can be accessed. The awesome thing here is that the user can upload the information using an App or device. Since the data is accessed in the blockchain(through Medichain API) any doctor can access the information of the record regardless of which EHR vendor they use .But this is where it gets interesting the user can give access to the data,or parts of data by using a smart card.Now you are the master of your own data .
To put it simply Medichain aims to rewards the customers for their data that they share.
Tokens
Medichain utility token (MCU) is the native token in the platform and each piece of data that the patient shares will be assigned some value thereby rewarding the patients.
Metrics
Total supply will be 100 million tokens and no more tokens will ever be created .
The token usage is distributed as follows .
1. Pre-Sale Maximum 6.5%
2. Public Sale 40%
3. Partner Fund 15%
4. Team & founder Fund 18%
5. Advisors 6.5%
6. Medical Data Fund 10%
7. Bounty 4%
The ico is in progress here and they have currently sold 13 million tokens. A total of 40 million tokens are for public sale .
Monetization
Now you may think how exactly is my data converted into money, consider the case where a big pharma company wants to collect the history of patients , their treatments, medication for a particular disease to research for a drug they are planning to develop. What the company will do is they will get the data from Medichain and in turn Medichain will send a percentage of MCU tokens to the patients whose records are shared (bear in mind you have given your approval for uploading the data in the first place) and the clinics . Then users can sell the MCU tokens in exchanges for money if they intend to.The below representation from the white paper shows the token usage within the ecosystem
The team behind it
The medical field is a vast and sensitive one and to bet on a radical change like this , you need a proper team with a vast experience in the domain which the medichain team does .A few of them are
Dr mark Baker – CEO and founder is a leading expert in security and big data predictive analysis
Dr Nicolas Smoll – who is working as research scientist at the University of Melbourne
RON Caferky – brings a lot to table having work in EHR previously and will jointhe team as EHR specialist.
Apart from them their also consists of various members specialising in Blockchain ,UX development, Marketing and PR plus reputed advisors as well.
Final thoughts
Using blockchain brings transparency and decentralization to the data that is stored. Plus blockchain provides safety for the data so that third parties can’t steal them and sell them in the dark web.
The team seems to have laid out the plan well in advance by seeing their plan which is present till 2020 which shows that they have thought it through and instills confidence.
To solve the scalability issue they plan to store the data off chain in cloud Database and only store the pointers to these data in the blockchain. Medichain are well aware that it isn’t possible for a patient to always to give their consent to access the data for example an emergency scenario. So information that needs to be available in case of emergency will need to be available to doctor , so the user will grant access to the data in these cases, but the data will not be available to say pharma companies where the big money is in play. The team are also aware of the fact that there are competitors in the industry but I wouldn’t mind it too much as the medical field is extremely huge. With the amount of money spent in pharma every year , I think it would be wise to bet on the pharma field and medichain which is trying to make it transparent to the users as well as monetize their data .
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