Blockchain can’t solve interoperability in Healthcare IT. Open standards can.
On January 21, the Slovenian blockchain community, Blockchain Združenje, organised a session on the latest developments in blockchain technologies and recent changes regarding raising capital via initial coin offerings (ICOs).
Iryo, being one of the upcoming ICOs was invited to present the current state and future potential of blockchain in healthcare IT.
Instead of giving a traditional ICO pitch, we decided to present our views on what the most important things are to look for in blockchain projects in healthcare. We wanted to give the audience some criteria that they could use to independently asses projects in this increasingly crowded space. We have already touched this topic briefly in a blog post for “Reform”, a leading UK based think-tank on public policy.
Iryo’s main points were:
- Stay away from projects that have a “silver bullet” mentality. “Blockchain will solve all issues in healthcare (IT).”
- Does the project have any specific ways of tackling the interoperability issue? We believe that the only way to truly start fixing the interoperability issue is to adopt open standards, such as OpenEHR. There are many solutions that still have proprietary standards, or simply are not putting this issue front and center.
- How does the solution guarantee that the patient is in full control of the data?
- How does the solution reduce the vendor lock-in that is the norm with established players in the industry?
We stood behind the idea that the token economy could be the driving force needed to implement change in healthcare IT.
We received some great questions from the audience which we are posting below:
1. How does Iryo differ from competitors?
- Iryo is fully committed to being open-source (back-end & clients).
- Iryo is built on open standards & medical archetypes (OpenEHR) for health data formats.
- We are using a public blockchain.
- We have a solid private key management & recovery solutions, powered by Zeropass (Read more about details here).
2. What are your reasons for not using a permissioned blockchain?
A blockchain is a public ledger. When talking about a private/permissioned blockchain, we are talking about a private public ledger, which makes little sense. We think permissioned blockchains are a smart marketing tactic, but they do not instil the same level of trust and transparency in a system that a public blockchain does.
3. Are you actively working on any deployments?
Our first customer is an America NGO, Walk with me, which provides basic medical care in refugee camps in the Middle East. Our solution will be deployed later this year and is aimed at improving the quality of care for the refugees and to ease the work of Walk with me’s medical staff. It will operate in 12 camps in 6 countries with a potential to reach 6 million people.
