In a recent article wrote at Healthcare News, the author described some potential applications of blockchain in healthcare but if you google it, all the articles describe almost the same thing. So, what we will do is to tell you which one is the most likely to have an impact in the near future and how we are going to use it in Hearthy.

The mission

The mission of Hearthy is to allow patients to have access and control their health data.

One of the most immediate applications in Hearthy : security

Article in Healthcare News : […] all transactions are time-stamped and replicated in every block visible to permissioned users but can never be altered, only appended. […] This can provide traceability for all health data access, with transparency to auditors, […] Blockchain can provide integrity of data by maintaining indelible hashes of the data, so that any alterations of the data are detected.

By allowing patients to share their data with very specific and transparent actors in the ecosystem, we will be able to leverage this security feature in medical research. How ?

How is Hearthy going to help research to decrease costs ?

Without real actions, many concurrent factors will end up at a catastrophic conundrum in the healthcare space :

• The population in the developing countries is getting older [source]
• The most frequent and homogen risk factor for the vast majority of diseases is age [source]
• States spend money for getting their population healthier when they get sick.
• The creation and validation of new medication is increasingly expensive for 2 main reasons : Clinical trials take a lot of time and money [costs per patient in average]. And new treatments, for example for cancer (see car-t-cells treatment), are much more advanced and specific (vs old chemotherapies) but this means that the costs of development, and hence commercialisation, is much higher.

So : Getting older = getting sicker ⇒ Getting sicker = spending more money to recover our good health ⇒ Treating diseases is increasingly expensive + we spend more money = The State will have to get the money somewhere but the population will be too old to work ⇒ Result : 💥

How can Hearthy help ?

Diminishing the costs and increased reliability of clinical trials.

• Data share : If the patient possesses his/her data, he can easily share it with institutions that will be able to leverage it either to recruit patients or to do multicentric international studies (see benefits). This would decrease the costs by reducing the time needed to recruit patients and increase the quality of the data since its access would have reliable sources as a collateral benefit of the blockchain security previously discussed.
• Reproducibility : By using blockchain, the studies criteria would be defined ex-ante and not changed ex-post (see biases in healthcare) as it is done now. That would also increase their reliability and reproducibility which would certainly have an impact in public health.
• The blockchain associated with patient identification would allow a follow-up of the patients for many years. This is especially important for studies about cardiovascular diseases where outcomes can only be measured many years after the initial intervention.

The technology in Hearthy will be Open Source. We want to help the different actors in the ecosystem to face the increasingly pressing challenges ahead of us.

About the author :

Juan Sebastian SUAREZ VALENCIA,MD. is a french physician, born in Bogota — Colombia. He is also an entrepreneur in telemedicine with a company in Paris, France and medical advisor at Hearthy. For more information : LinkedIn