What is MediChain?

With all the ICO’s currently going on, I recently came across an upcoming ICO for a company called MediChain. This is a company that is drawing a lot of attention despite the huge number of ICO happening at this moment. There is plenty of investors’ interest as this is amongst the few applications of blockchain in the medical industry.

MediChain gives patients ownership of their own medical data so that we can control our own medical information and not allow major corporations to sell our medical information at their whim and fancies.

MediChain plans to introduce big data and block-chain technology to the electronic health records (EHR) industry. The block-chain securely stores health records and maintains a single version of the truth. Different medical organizations (doctors, hospitals, labs) and patients can request permission to access a patient’s records from the block-chain. Patients have more control over who sees their data, while healthcare providers can provide better patient care based on more accurate data.

Benefits

MediChain offers the following benefits over existing ways of storing medical information.

For a start medical prescriptions will not be lost. It will forever be on the blockchain.

As a patient you are able to access your data anywhere. Imagine being able to access this data not only at the family doctor, but on holiday in a foreign country where you have gone and can’t speak the local language. 

MediChain stores this data safely and anonymized. The stored data by the company is encrypted and unreadable. 

Patients have full control over accessing their healthcare data and can control who sees their data and what they see. This will allow for instantly updating and transferring of medical data. Patients can share their records, get second opinions, and communicate online with medical professionals.

This means reduced risk of errors, and better patient care so that not only do we get the care we need, during times of emergency, the doctors treating us will be able to know our entire medical history to better cater for our care.

A greater possibility would exist for true personalized medicine. Based on data from MediChain, health apps could include medication assessments, diet and nutritional advice. All personalized to a specific user.

MediChain does this at no cost to patients or doctors. The patient can choose to sell the anonymized data to insurers, research companies, universities all for the greater good of healthcare.  This would speed up the development of new drugs and also reduce cost of medicine. 

How it would work

MediChain would work as follows:

Patients would have access to their own data by means of a smart card, with different levels of authentication. This will ensure that the access is only given to the correct person. The data is stored in an anonymized form.

A client company, typically a pharmaceutical company, wants to purchase anonymised data with the patients consent. The pharma would create an order through an API, providing a request on required set of metrics (for example location, gender and age), the available amount of medical records in the ecosystem can be received by API request, thus the price of data will be known in advance.

When the payment for the data purchase service is done, the company converts received fiat funds into tokens

Although MediChain does have competitors, it believes its approach will win due to the partnership it wants to make with the current medical data industry. MediChain has chosen to do things in a different, by focusing on “big data” and the benefit it can provide to the existing EMR industry. Applying this technology to data that is complete and correct would surely mean the next generation of medical breakthroughs.

If MediChain succeeds in its mission it will have a great impact on humanity. Health is the most important thing to everyone.