[blockchain] Tales from the crypt-O: How health system will work in the blockchain world of 2078
Disclaimer: Everything that follows is true.
Everyone knows I love sci-fi, and everyone knows I love blockchain, but this is too much even for me.
A few days ago I was walking my dogs in the Crane River Park close to where I live. It was early morning, maybe around 6:45, when a flash of light struck from the sky. What I initially thought was something coming from Chertsey Road, closeby, but I was too deep into the woods for that to be true.
Bit and Loop, my dogs, got scared as we approached the crash site where a small rocket was set in a small hole.
It was like a low-budget movie prop from the ’70s landed in my backyard.
Moving even closed we realised that the rocket-shaped thing got almost cracked open by the impact and a small piece of plastic with writings on it was rolled inside.
I waited for the smoke to clear and with a stick, I pulled the plastic from the rocket.
Unrolling the transparent plastic, I realised it was a sort of letter written in English with an elegant non-serif font.
As you may realise reading it, this seemed to be part of a book, and it also was clear that this was not the first chapter of it.
You can imagine my shock when I realised it was about Blockchain and what the world will look like in 2078!
The content of the letter follows.
My Dear Friend:
In this letter, I would like to give you some insights into the health system in 2078. I will not spend time explaining the overall scenario, as I already did this in my four previous letters.
As you might already suspect, in my time, corporations are the primary source of innovation, not academia.
Brands like Virgin, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and SpaceX lead research all over the planet.
Facebook recently launched its fifth mission to bring health pods to Africa and India.
Before explaining this, let me give you a little more insight into how the health system works now.
AI and blockchain have completely changed the way we deliver cures. If I am reading history books correctly, in your time, every diagnosis and prescription had to go through a doctor or, as you call them in the UK, a GP.
History taught us that the rate of human errors in this process could be very high and was sometimes even lethal.
Medicine is not a science but a collection of best practices aimed to statistically maximise the chances of success of curing a condition.
This process is highly imprecise and not cost-effective. Even with a centralised system, you need to go through several systems to find all the data regarding a patient’s clinical history.
In my time, everything is saved on the public blockchain. Every medical and clinical information is now stored in a shared and public ledger.
Information is secured and anonymised, and you need the private key that everyone stores in his sub-dermal chip to encrypt the data.
Please be mindful that some information before the “big reset” of 2025 might not be so accurate.
The cost-effectiveness of this solution is incredible. There is no more waste of drugs, every single bunch is tracked, and the efficiency is measured in real time by your chip’s onboard sensors.
From what I read, in your time there were many scandals about the effectiveness and on how drugs were prescripted to patients.
In 2078, doctors are no longer in control of the prescriptions, AI is; 99.5% of the medical anamnesis is carried on by AI using the immutable information stored on the blockchain and the logic inside the smart contracts.
Robo-doctors scan the patients with the most advanced AI and diagnose and dispense cures in minutes.
The chip everyone has in their bodies is an IoT device running on a blockchain. The chips can talk to each other and create sub blockchains even if they cannot connect to the main network.
All information on a patients’ prescriptions is saved in the smart contract that stores all their data.
Only when the AI confidence level falls below 99% is a human doctor’s anamnesis requested.
Blockchain and AI have maximised the efficiency of the public and private health systems, resulting in a complete change to the medical discipline.
Students now go to college to study medical AI and how to make it better rather than learning bedside manners to deal with real patients.
In a way, all doctors are now engineers.
This enhancement has allowed medical care to be extended in countries that were struggling to provide even a minimum level of support to the population.
As I already said, Facebook just completed its fifth mission in central Africa. They landed five pods with medical AI and a fast Globenet connection.
Each pod is a giant computer in a container that is solar powered and able to run autonomously for years without maintenance. The pod can synthesise most drugs and request more raw materials for other pods or the Facebook HQ.
Every pod can connect to the public blockchain via Globenet and gather information in real time.
Smart contracts can independently decide to change the cure based on the data coming from other pods or other hospitals all around the globe.
No more wrong diagnosis and prescriptions then? No, not really.
Worldwide there is a social movement against what we call the AI-deaths.
Sometimes, the AI got things wrong, and the consequences were severe.
Pharma companies are now part of the significant innovations hubs led by the tech companies. Alphabet acquired Novartis in the early ‘30s.
Innovation is now a corporate responsibility, and states and governments are only controlling bodies.
Now that everything is tracked and transparent, the risk of corruption is way lower, not zero though.
Drugs are prescripted based on needs, and the price is decided by a smart contract whose code is public and had been designed by the pharma companies.
Storing encrypted and secured health-related information on the public blockchain also changed the way insurance and pensions works, even how you get a mortgage based on your health.
I’ll be giving you more insights on the above in some of the next letters.
Is the system perfect then? Not at all; it is better than in your time, but still much has to be done. Crypto-crime is at its peak and many areas of the planet are still in turmoil. Not being in perfect balance seems to be a human trait after all.
Talk to you soon in the next letter.
Z.
