Blockchain in Healthcare — EOS Meetup (Brooklyn, NY)
Iryo is the first blockchain driven healthcare network that will be built on EOS. On February 23rd we organised a meetup in Brooklyn, in collaboration with EOS New York.
See the full list of events we will attend HERE.
New York
We organized a meetup in New York on Friday, February 23rd in Dumbo, Booklyn. The meetup consisted of three presentations and a panel discussion. We covered:
- Global digital health market overview
- Blockchains, EOS and the growing community in New York
- How does blockchain fit into healthcare
- What will get disrupted in the highly regulated healthcare industry first (panel discussion with Q&A)
The digital health market is estimated at $60–80 billion at the moment, expected to grow to $300–400 billion in the next 5 to 7 years. This is still a very small proportion inside the global spending for healthcare, which is estimated to reach $8,7 trillion by 2020, according to Deloitte, which predicts the global health care spending to increase at an annual rate of 4.1% in 2017–2021 up from just 1.3% in 2012–2016.
As presented by our business developer, Tjaša Zajc, technology is just one of the tools addressing the worrisome rise of healthcare costs. Other steps aiming at controlling and lowering costs are policy and regulation changes such as going from fee for service to outcome based payments or new business models such as payers becoming providers. Blockchain projects are bringing a new spectrum of ideas around emerging token economy.
The key challenge for new companies remains the same: understanding the complexity of the healthcare sector and relations between payers, providers and final users, when planning implementation and scaling.
EOS
CEO and Co-founder of EOS New York, Rick Schlesinger, spoke about blockchains, EOS and the growing community in New York. Rick leads the EOS block production business strategy and oversees operations across capital investments, finance, and legal matters. He was previously was with EY (Ernst & Young) as a management consultant advising Fortune 500 companies on business strategy and M&A and held various roles across asset management industry, often focusing on Life Sciences companies.
As the audience was mixed — from those primarily interested in healthcare to those interested in different blockchain and ICO projects, Rich talked about the potential of blockchain in general first, moving towards specifics of EOS later on.
“Blockchain is moving us one step closer to an open source economy. As every innovation becomes available to all, the differentiating factor will eventually become politics and governance.”
EOS will provide the platform to build dApps. One of the key EOS characteristic is the power to execute over a million transactions per second, which is significantly higher compared to 5–6 that Bitcoin currently enables or 12–30 on Ethereum.
Another EOS specific is the establishment of delegated block producers — elected organizations that validate transactions and provide the networking infrastructure on which the EOS.IO blockchain runs. Block producers are elected by the token holders (i.e., the community), so they are able to influence the network’s direction (e.g., software upgrades).
EOS New York’s mission is to ensure the success of the EOS blockchain by securing the network as a block producer, promote cooperation amongst block producers, and invest in the growth of the EOS network.
Iryo
Our CEO, Vasja Bočko, continued with his thoughts on the current state of healthcare IT, which is in general struggling with into poor security, poor scalability, high maintenance costs, bad UX and ignorance towards the end users. Blockchain technology is bringing a new level of trust and security.
New blockchain healthcare projects are arising every day, a lot of them with a silver bullet mentality around the capability of blockchain technology. The key characteristics of Iryo are:
- the use of a public blockchain,
- pragmatic use of blockchain & decentralisation with private key management,
- open standards (OpenEHR) for data interoperability,
- creating open-source software and emphasis on unleashing the research potential by building a global repository of medical data.
Who is the decision maker in healthcare?
The event concluded with a panel discussion regarding disruptive opportunities within the highly regulated healthcare industry. We were honoured to be joined by Dr. Alex Cahana, MD who has over 25 years in clinical medicine. Dr. Cahana is the Head of Healthcare and Cryptosolutions at Cryptooracle investment firm, which supports the growth of companies paving the way for the new crypto economy.
Dr. Cahana is a bold thinker with a deep insight into healthcare business models, as well as the complex relationships among decision makers and users of technology and IT systems. During the discussion, he talked at length about incentives and the struggles that companies face when entering a new market. Most doctors have no word in decision making around the software they use in the facility they work for, so believing you can sell an app, because doctors like it, is far from the final success, was one of his warnings.
Dr. Cahana consults a variety of international companies, start-ups and healthcare providers on digital therapies, digiceutical integration and healthcare redesign.
