DEVITA : What is DEVITA?
DEVITA: Leveraging Decentralized Healthcare Data & User-centric Tokenomics to Revolutionize Patient Wellness
For decades, healthcare institutions have commodified patient data and disenfranchised the individual to be so far removed from their own origination that the thought of owning that information is now treated as an innovation. DEVITA aims to level the playing field and make the healthcare industry more equitable as a whole by transforming how patients store, access, and monetize their personal healthcare data. Our approach to healthcare data infrastructure will democratize the current siloed landscape of storing and distributing patient assets — protected health information (PHI) and electronic health records (EHR) — that are currently monopolized by institutions that actively prevent key stakeholders from accessing their databases. In brief, DEVITA leverages innovations in blockchain technology — Decentralized Identification and Non-fungible Tokens, to name a few — for application in optimizing existing healthcare workflows. However, to really understand how DEVITA will execute on its goal to revolutionize healthcare, let us first look at the current state of patient treatment and data storage. Please note that much of what follows will be based on western healthcare practices, but the core issues identified are ubiquitous.
“Our push to revolutionize healthcare by resolving glaring inefficiencies in the current system will change healthcare
from all angles.”
When a patient goes to a hospital to seek treatment, a direct interaction occurs with the provider, e.g., a doctor or nurse, collecting the PHI that becomes part of the patient’s file, which becomes an EHR. That EHR can take many forms, but ultimately its storage is handled by a third-party vendor. Note that only a few large institutions provide data storage services and that most if not all providers need this service. Then payers, i.e., insurance companies or even the government, will determine how much money moves around based on specific diagnoses found within the EHR. In this digital age, one might justifiably assume that acquiring the files from third-party institutions would only require a simple data transfer — SFTP, shared cloud access, email. Unfortunately, that is seldom the case. EHR can be a digital file or a physical document like an encounter note or X-ray, and these institutions do not always engage in this process of digitizing non-digital artefacts. Usually, another vendor will come in and execute the transfer by literally sending in people to take physical documents and scan them. After processing the PHI from the provider, the data transfer vendors will then send the EHR to the third-party storage vendor. Payers then have to reach out to the third-party storage vendor to get the data to determine which providers to pay and how much. Also, consider that at every step post patient/provider encounter, the payer, provider, and all the vendors need to negotiate payment terms and conditions. The patient can hardly play a role in any of this, and getting access would not be much easier for them. In many parts of the world, it would be impossible.
As you can see, the landscape is an inefficient web with unnecessary toll booths that create too many points for healthcare data to transfer and transform. Though portability is a substantial value add for data in many cases, the reality is that we end up not only with inefficiencies but can end up causing actual harm to patients as you realize that providers also are indentured to this system when attempting to find patient records to treat new patients from other providers. In addition, it becomes a public policy failure when EHR quality and accuracy degrades as it goes through all these artificial chokepoints, resulting in lives lost when providers only have access to incomplete records.
Aside from the devastating loss of life, there is an astronomical waste of capital. Governments and private companies needlessly spend billions of dollars on the current system, and much of the wealth gets hoarded by the institutional data storage vendors. In Global South countries where the physical infrastructure to do the physical data transport and parts of the data transfer may be undeveloped, the economic loss may be less overall, but the impact on patient health and treatment will almost inevitably be much higher.
“…DEVITA will always stay true to its vision
of making good health accessible to all people.”
In addition to the financial waste and detriment to patient health, the whole system around centralized data completely ignores the stakeholder hierarchy. The patient has the most to lose and gain from the EHR. All healthcare data originates from the patient and their interaction with the provider, so allowing a third party to take and then restrict access to EHR does not make any sense. DEVITA understands and respects the patient’s need and place in the stakeholder hierarchy and thus logically focuses on the patient-provider interaction via the encounter with its telehealth mobile application. Leveraging blockchain technology with a combination of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and the Ethereum Swarm network, we have created a decentralized database structure where the encounter record and any associated data can be stored with the patient firmly set as the true owner. We utilize a host of other applications of blockchain technology that allow for use cases like capturing all valuable data from encounters — consultations, diagnosis, prescriptive treatment, etc. — and recording it on-chain, keeping everything encrypted, secure, and accessible. One important use case to note is DEVITA’s LIFE token. The conception and design of the LIFE token is based on the idea that the patient should lie in the center of any healthcare system because the inherent goal of healthcare is to help the patient. In the existing healthcare system, any request from any party for EHR would go to the third-party vendor at whatever cost agreed upon. With our platform, DEVITA users will receive those requests and be fairly compensated with the LIFE token, which in turn can be exchanged on any centralized or decentralized digital asset exchange. This would be just one of many applications of tokenomics that is utilized within our platform.
Placing the patient — the DEVITA user — first and thereby building a new system that prioritizes their needs will have a more significant impact than improving the patient’s quality of life as an individual. Our push to revolutionize healthcare by resolving glaring inefficiencies in the current system will change healthcare from all angles. Insurance costs will be mitigated by not paying exorbitant rates to third-party vendors, which may translate to charging the patient less for better coverage. Pharmaceutical companies and other research institutions can easily acquire and adequately compensate with LIFE token for anonymized sample data at no risk and maximize benefit to the patient. Government legislators can draft policy with that same sample data that is inherently resistant to politicization. That said, DEVITA will always stay true to its vision of making good health accessible to all people.
About DEVITA
DEVITA is a decentralized healthcare platform applying the latest digital technologies to solve classic problems in healthcare access, data, and infrastructure.
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DEVITA is not an investment product. DEVITA is not intended in its design or distribution to be utilized as a form of investment, speculation, or as a financial product. No information herein constitutes financial advice. PLEASE do your OWN research before participating in the DEVITA Platform. Neither the DEVITA team nor any representative affiliate of the DEVITA team will ever solicit investments.
