Connect to a Health Data Marketplace from the Palm of Your Hand
Mercatus: gathering for the purposes of commerce, market.
Did you know that there are over 300 different Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems in use in the US? And that for an average doctor visit, the patient’s medical record is recorded in at least 3 different information systems? Now consider that a patient sees an average of 18.7 different doctors in her lifetime, and for patients over 65 that average increases to 28.4 individual doctors, including primary care, specialists, hospital and urgent care providers. And shockingly, there is little-to-no communication of data between all of these doctors and systems. The patient’s medical record is left scattered across different types of systems, controlled by different IT departments, and behind many different firewalls — everywhere but with the patient and her family.
In addition to being scattered, that health data is de-identified differently by each system, and is difficult to access and share due to interoperability and privacy issues. This leaves providers with an incomplete picture of the patient’s overall health and hinders a holistic approach to both short- and long-term care. Additionally, consumers are forced to spend time and money to get portable access to their own records, and medical researchers and scientists are frustrated in their attempts to access and share health information in a consistent manner. Why is this important? Because Data Analytics, research, new drug discoveries, and clinical trials are all hindered when scientists and researchers don’t have access to an individual’s longitudinal health history.
That’s why we developed Health Wizz — a personal EHR system that the consumer carriers with her wherever she goes.
CONSUMERS
Health Wizz addresses both aspects of this fractured healthcare data environment. The revolutionary Health Wizz app aggregates an individual’s medical history and health records, including their genome and data downloaded from wearables, as digital assets that they own and keep with them at all times — at home, at work, on vacation, when travelling, or when changing doctors or medical providers.
Why is this so important? Our own team members can tell you from personal experience. While traveling (within the US), one member ended up in the ER. His family spent hours requesting and transferring faxes of health records from his home hospital. When he was discharged, he went home with a thick file of paper records. In another incident, my mother fell and ended up being admitted to ERs in two different hospitals. The first ER couldn’t find anything wrong and discharged her, so she was admitted to a second ER the next day when she complained of acute pain. Doctors had to repeat tests simply because the first hospital could not transfer the test results electronically in time for the second emergency room. In both these cases, having their healthcare data in a portable environment would have saved time and money, and allowed the patient to get better, more timely care. “View/Download/Transmit” (VDT) mandates from the government and the 21st Century Cures Act provide consumers multiple options to access their Electronic Health Record (EHR) data. The Health Wizz app fulfills this requirement.
Why should you care? Consider this. 10% of the 600 million imaging procedures performed each year by health-care providers in the US — including CT scans, X-rays, ultrasounds and MRIs — are duplicative; a redundant scan is performed simply because the physician had no access to a previous image. The cost of these unnecessary services? $25 billion a year, paid for by consumers through insurance premiums and taxes.
THE HEALTHCARE DATA MARKETPLACE
The Health Wizz app also allows individuals to trade, share or donate their health data in a secure, confidential health data marketplace. Most individuals are not even aware that their health data is already part of a multi-billion-dollar medical data bazaar, let alone that they could benefit from sharing it! The market for crypto-assets is rapidly growing and emerging as an asset-class in its own right. Health Wizz empowers consumers to treat their private medical records as digital assets that can be traded for cryptocurrency in a fair and efficient health data marketplace.
The Health Wizz app is designed with the health data marketplace in mind. We envision a virtual playground where individuals, medical researchers, health data scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and developers come together to exchange health data, and eventually apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to design new precision medicine. Our goal is to enable researchers to interact directly with participants’ data, including their genetic information, to come up with new, ground-breaking treatments to benefit all of us.
TECHNICAL INNOVATION
Health Wizz uses an Ethereum Blockchain for health data trading using cryptocurrency. The virtual marketplace will have access to linkable healthcare data from millions of individuals — all under the complete control of the individual to whom this data belongs. And this number will grow with the participation of additional Health Wizz users. The marketplace will include data from EHRs, lab results including genome sequencing, medical claims, prescription claims, wearables and other data sources.
Health Wizz will provide powerful self-service tools to write smart contracts that enable scientists to build custom datasets by understanding and selecting relevant data sources, identifying counts of target patients and exploring longitudinality across multiple sources. Every dataset Health Wizz makes accessible in this marketplace will be interoperable because the data will be accessed using FHIR APIs (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource Application Programming Interfaces). Our system and application design, as well as a detailed account of the features of our platform, can be found in our white paper, titled “A user-centric approach to making medical records accessible on blockchain”.
FUTURE OF THE MARKETPLACE
We are especially excited about the potential for researchers, data analysts and scientists to dive deeper into data that could, for example, provide a better understanding of disease progression and a drug’s impact through the course of a disease. Researchers and scientists will be able to assemble and repackage the necessary components of clinical documentation, patient generated health data and their genome — just like individual, standardized LEGO pieces combine to produce an infinite variety of objects. We will see data being put together that has never been put together before, fueling ground-breaking research and giving new insights into disease and treatment.
COMMUNITY
To keep informed about Health Wizz and the development of the virtual healthcare data marketplace, follow us on Telegram, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Tell us what you think about your phone being a window to a health data marketplace and how you would like to see this market evolve.
