Competitor Analysis of Tokenized Blockchain Solutions in Healthcare.
In general, competitors tend to share similar values, the core value being that they are not satisfied with the status quo.
This review is mainly conducted on the technical documentation provided that can be found within the competitor’s own whitepapers. A review of the team, deployment status, or the ability of the token-moon scenario will not be included. The comparison will be partly based off the likeliness of achieving a “Bearer Health Record,” which is the notion that the holder of the record is the sole owner of the underlying asset, in our case, private medical data.
You can find more about the criteria here: The case for bearer health records. Additional criteria to be compared will be based of Iryo’s proposed solutions.
Iryo
• The use of an EOS-based public chain for patient signed permissions.
• Lack of identity on the Iryo platform, to avoid wrongdoing.
• Open-source, openEHR, permissionless access.
• A copy of a patient’s medical history / record on their device.
• Zero-knowledge encryption, patient-controlled key on all backups (Clinic Node & Iryo Cloud).
• “Analyse in place” research occurs solely on the patient’s device to prevent data leaks.
• Comprehensive distributed key recovery with ZeroPass utilization.
• “Opt-out” Emergency access with smart contract enforced bounty.
Token distribution:
• 10% Tokens withheld for team and development.
• 5% private presale.
• 5% Airdrops.
• 80% Token Distribution (Crowdsale).
• 2% yearly inflation. (1% for development and storage cost, 1% for researchers on-boarding and community airdrops).
MediBloc
MediBloc Shortcomings
• Deploying a proprietary chain (we consider this a huge development overhead but we hope they can deliver!)
• Using IPFS decentralised storage, but simultaneously offering their own copy to increase the reliability — which means they don’t trust IPFS but are still using it which increases development costs and overall complexity of the system. No information can be found wether this system would be open to public nodes or not, and what happens if keys leak and encrypted data is just there for the taking.
• Voting on “p2p identity” concept, seems reckless and lacks clear definition (how will it protect against Sybil attacker trying to revoke one’s identity?).• They claim to offer zero-knowledge and re-encryption but their whitepaper is saying that there are users who can read everything (missing pieces, technical details).
• MediBloc centralises all searchable information on their servers (opt-out)! They would be using Intel SGX enclave for privacy. This method has already been proven to be a dead end; breached by different teams, or even used to hide spying (undetectable spyware!),
• No information on key recovery.
MediBloc Positives:
• Open source (although their GitHub appears dead?)
• Public blockchain.
• Mobile phone has a copy of the medical data.
• Encryption with patient key.
• Using NuCypher for re-encryption (this information is missing in their whitepaper, so we are unable to confirm for sure).
Token distribution:
• 50% stays with team/founders/investors/researchers.
• 50% went to the general crowdsale sale.
• They added 5% yearly inflation (first year, then slowly declines).
Bearer Health Record score: 3/5 (mainly because of missing documentation).
Medicalchain
Medicalchain Shortcomings:
• The use of the Hyperledger Fabric (centralised apache Kafka re-branded database) as a blockchain for permission control, data immutability. Usually, in hyperledger fabric there is one cloud-based database that holds all this data.
• Closed-source!
• No local copy (user can be locked out of their data).
• Patients are at the mercy of the Medicalchain network which can technically deny them access to encrypted data.
• No clear notion of data redundancy over different jurisdictions.
• Emergency access is done with a bracelet, this approach works in theory, but we doubt patients would actually have to wear these bracelets in emergency situations (people tend to dislike having to wear medical tags).
• No clear notion on how the whole system would make the loss of data as unlikely as possible, while still preserving the encryption key control of the end user.
The good stuff about Medicalchain:
• Zero-knowledge data storage.
• Notion of decentralised key-recovery with bracelet
Token distribution:
• 65% for the team (31% promised to partners/promotion/community).
• only 35% of tokens are sold in the ICO.
Bearer Health Record score: 2/5 (encryption and some key recovery considerations)
Amchart
Amchart Shortcomings:
• Permissioned blockchain.
• Centralized consortium based depository.
• No encryption, everything in plain sight.
• They centralise all searchable information on their servers. Using Intel SGX enclave for privacy. This method was already proven to be the dead end; breached by different teams, or even used to hide the spying (undetectable spyware!).
• Centralised key recovery
Token distribution:
48% private sale
48% public sale
4% patient incentive program
Bearer Health Record score: 0/5
MediChain
MediChain Shortcomings:
• ‘Registrar Contract’ — their entry point is permissioned; users can be locked out of their permissions. MediChain managed to run permissioned blockchain on a public chain.
• Their “Database Gatekeeper” decides to enforce the rules. Hacker can simply bypass those permissions by accessing the data directly.
• No data encryption.
• Closed-source.
• Extremely naive blockchain integration.
Token distribution:
50% Team and their fund.
4% Bounty.
46% Crowdsale.
Bearer Health Record score: 0/5
Patientory
We decided to include Patientory due to them having first mover advantage and being well known within the community.
Patientory Shortcomings:
• Majority of the medical data stays in silos, they are operating on a private Ethereum network connected to normal plain storage (instead of normal database?!).• Closed-source.
• Their whitepaper shows a confused 2nd layer that would talk to the world through RPC server.
• No encryption, just data access limitations (just like normal databases). Hospitals can just delete/read information regardless of the permission.
• Key recovery is not even needed because the accounts can be reinstated by the hospital.
Token distribution:
• 30% for team and foundation
• 70% for sale
Bearer Health Record score: 0/5 (no improvements on bearer front from the traditional FHIR compliant databases)
We have ordered the list in terms of strongest competitors listed first (Medibloc, Medicalchain).
Disclaimer: I am a current member of the Iryo team and the content in this post is based off my best assessment of the competitors technology.
If any of the information provided in this review is inaccurate, please feel free to contact me directly, I am happy to fix it.
Word of caution: projects might pivot, some parts might get re-done, some documentation might resurface. We hope they improve and derive their good ideas from Iryo so the whole medical space can progress!
2.) What previously unseen network effects do Bearer Health Records enable?
3.) How Iryo token captures the value of the Bearer Health Record
4.) Lastly, see why our competitors are unable to deliver on that promise.
