Inside Medicalchain Issue #19
Welcome to the nineteenth issue of Inside Medicalchain, our monthly newsletter to keep our community up to date. If you missed the eighteenth issue, you can catch up by clicking here.
MyClinic.com Rooms: Free video calling between doctors and patients
With the worldwide pandemic COVID-19 the need for remote consultations is more urgent and important than ever. We are proud to announce the launch of MyClinic.com Rooms to help doctors see patients remotely for free.
Rooms is a simple tool that allows for a virtual waiting room where patients can be directed to ‘check into’ whilst they wait for their doctor to begin the video consultation.
If you’re a health professional, please give it a try — go to MyClinic.com and create your own clinic. With a few clicks, a virtual waiting room is created by you. You can then share your 6 digit code with all of your patients.
They will join and can consult with you one at a time, with no interruptions. You and your patients can use your favourite devices. No apps to download.
At the time of writing, Rooms is already in use in over 40 countries worldwide!
For our short video of our CEO, Dr Abdullah Albeyatti introducing Rooms, click here.
Product development: Going open-source
Last month, we notified our community that we are going open-source. What does this mean?
Open-source means sharing our MyClinic.com source code with others making it freely available allowing it to be redistributed and modified by others.
We took this step as we realised what we had been creating could benefit a great number of people in society, not just locally or nationally but internationally.
We have travelled to many countries with different healthcare systems but the issues have all been the same. A lack of access to services, a lack of patient choice and a lack of patient autonomy.
We aim to allow others to join us on our journey to empower patients to have access to their medical records and remove these healthcare barriers. By making our source code available, developers and technicians will be able to adjust and modify what we have built to customise the care and service that their particular community needs. Be it a simple language change to adding more complex features — the whole service will be fully customisable.
Of course, this is no small task but we hope to approach the open-source community for support to help promote our system and vision.
Together, we can improve healthcare for all.
Media
Our CEO and COO Dr Abdullah Albeyatti and Mo Tayeb have recently been published in the highly impactful Genome Medicine Journal, following Medicalchain’s presentation at the European Union (EU) initiative on the Digital Transformation of Health and Care (Digicare). Check out the open access article here, titled “Towards a European health research and innovation cloud (HRIC)”
Dr Abdullah Albeyatti is the latest guest to speak to Conor Sweetman of Insurtech Radio: “We’re not inventing something new, we’re asking the Medical industry to catch up with the technology being used in other sectors”.
Listen here:
Apple: https://bit.ly/2E2FlFW
Spotify: https://bit.ly/2rl6SzW
Google podcasts: https://bit.ly/2JIlJfd
InsurTech Radio website: https://bit.ly/3a3Pv7f
Dr Abdullah Albeyatti was also at Leeds University Business School discussing blockchain applications within healthcare and our vision to democratise health.
Inside perspective
This section aims to provide an insight into the project, including the people behind the scenes who are working extremely hard to make our vision a reality.
At Medicalchain we have a brilliant team of engineers and developers who are making our dream a reality by building world-class blockchain applications and software.
With the recent release of Rooms in response to the global pandemic, we wanted you to get an idea of how we build our technological innovations from the bottom up.
Bara Mustafa is our Chief Technology Officer at Medicalchain, and has been with us since the very start of our project. He has a wealth of experience in software and blockchain development and led to the development of Rooms.
Bara Mustafa, CTO at Medicalchain
As always, we asked Bara some questions for you:
How would you best describe your role as Chief Technology Officer?
As the project and team have grown, my role has changed and taken on new forms. Whilst still in a start-up mindset of all ‘hands to the pump’ I have the added responsibility of taking a step back and assessing how different projects are doing, where to allocate resources and foresee difficulties early on. My primary role, however, is to support my team and especially the co-founders by providing insight and opinion to help them best judge in which direction the companies next measured footstep should be.
What are the next steps for the development of Rooms, the open-source project and the Medicalchain blockchain-based EHR record platform?
Using our experience and skill set we built Rooms in under two weeks to urgently fulfil the demand for more video consultation options to help support health professionals and patients who might be self-isolating but still requiring medical attention. This has been a wide success and has now been used in over 42 countries by medical staff from all walks of life from hospital doctors, to family doctors to physiotherapists, sexual health doctors and beyond. We are humbled to have helped so many people in a short space of time and continue to monitor and support these users during these unprecedented times.
As a result, we have split our developer teams to support MyClinic.com Rooms whilst we continue to make improvements to the original MyClinic.com project which is now going open-source. This is all happening at the same time whilst we complete the back end side of our business to be the foundation for our blockchain-based EHR system.
How does going open-source affect the future developments for Medicalchain & MyClinic.com moving forward? How can developers around the world contribute?
We took the decision to open-source our work as we feel passionate about democratising healthcare and empowering patients wherever they may be. Our digital outpatient solution with a lean electronic health record system and video consultation tool will be published on popular open-source websites such as GitHub where the source code will be available for others to contribute, add features and build upon the foundations we have set. This will allow keen developers to customise their version of our solution and add unique features which can be pushed back to the central community for all of us to benefit from it.
How does Medicalchain, and working in the health-technology industry generally, compare to previous projects you have worked on in the past?
Very different! In a reassuring fashion, health-technology is peppered with security requirements and hazard logs. This, however, does generate a mountain of necessary documentation which needs to accompany every feature or development we make. I must admit it is not the favourite part of my job but has given me a great insight into what is required and reassures me that what we have built is robust.
To be added to the Dynamic Purchasing System Framework of the NHS, as one of the online consultations approved suppliers in the UK I know first hand what it took to get through those hoops. There is a constant battle of innovation versus adhering to standards and conditions set out on a national and sometimes international scale. It is my job to push our solutions to the limit of keeping within the system and legal requirements whilst being disruptive.
What advice would you have for anyone interested in getting involved in health-technology, as a complete beginner?
You can’t find a better time to get involved in health tech and the doors and investment are wide open looking for solutions on every level. Take advantage of resources around you on the internet and feel free to contact companies involved in this space to gain insight into your potential venture into this exciting and boundless field.
Social Media
Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to ask us questions and engage with our communications team. If you have not had the chance to say hello yet, please click on one of the links!
Join a Medicalchain Community Today!
· Telegram (English)
· Telegram (Japanese — Medicalchain 日本公式コミュニティ)
· Telegram (Chinese — Medicalchain 官方中文群)
· Telegram (Italian — Medicalchain Italia)
· Telegram (Korean — Medicalchain 공식채팅방)
· Twitter (Japanese)
· Medium
· Youtube
Don’t forget to sign up for your free healthcare passport
The Medicalchain Health Passport signup is live! Prospective patients and medical practitioners can register their interest now, by clicking here.
Upcoming Issues
- About our formal launch of MyClinic.com with onboarding of new clinics.
- Partnerships within the NHS and private sector that we are very much looking forward to sharing with you all.
Thanks for reading the nineteenth newsletter of Inside Medicalchain. For more information on where to purchase our tokens (MTN), click here. Follow the development of Medicalchain on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and join the community on Telegram.
