The story behind the Iryo Network
Digital platforms have become commonplace in so many areas of our lives, banking, transportation, and commerce have all become incredibly efficient over the last two decades. Unfortunately, IT infrastructure within healthcare industries have fallen way behind in terms of privacy, adoption and efficiency.
A group of senior developers and executives at 3fs decided it was finally time to do something about the current technology gap in healthcare. 3fs is a Slovenian technology company that consults and builds highly scalable IT infrastructure projects for Fortune 500 companies. They have been long-time technology partners with Ericsson. 3fs was recently amongst the finalists for the fastest-growing companies in Slovenia in 2017. So far, 3fs has incubated four successful spin-offs — Toshl, Toonia, TrickyTribe and Lake, the latter receiving the Apple Design Award in 2017. This past year, 3fs decided to pool its deep knowledge base and resources to help improve the current state of technology in healthcare.
One of the first and most important steps was to identify where an established IT company like 3fs, could add value to existing medical workflows. After countless interviews with advisors and numerous debates with physicians and healthcare experts, the concept for Iryo was born.
Where to begin? Lets start with the fundamentals: Electronic Health Records (EHR).
Many technologies that exist to make healthcare more efficient are not effectively utilised. The lengthy implementation of new IT systems, politics and special interest groups in the form of IT vendors, Pharma and Medtech often lead to poor user adoption within medical institutions.
For patients, one of the most frustrating things in terms of user experience once they need medical attention, is the lack of EHR interoperability. In the era of cloud computing, on-demand services and efficient workflow design, it is unacceptable that patients still need to travel from one specialist to another with discharge letters and lab results on paper. The disconnect can be attributed to the fact that modern IT systems within medical institutions don’t speak the same language. As a result, these two forces hinder innovation in the advancement of healthcare IT.
Own and control your health data.
At Iryo, the notion that the patient is not the one in charge of their medical data is unacceptable. In many cases, patients don’t have access to their medical history and are forced to go through hurdles or even pay to get copies of past medical results. Iryo’s primary mission to create an effective solution to this common problem. The Iryo Network will enable patients to access their medical records through something as common and simple as their mobile device. When a medical institution will require access to medical data, patients will receive a notification and be asked for permissioned access to the record. This permission is secured by the use of a public blockchain and modern cryptographic technology. Additionally, if a research institution is looking to collect medical data, patients will be incentivised to reveal their medical record in exchange for Iryo tokens. The tokens can then be used for healthcare services offered within the Iryo network.
The technology behind Iryo.
The solution is an Electronic Health Record (EHR) platform driven by blockchain in order to secure the patient-driven, data-access controls. The platform is designed to enable the creation of a global healthcare ecosystem. The Iryo platform is open-source, built upon openEHR archetypes — a transparent, universal EHR standard designed by medical domain experts with the hope of increasing global interoperability in healthcare.
How will Iryo will drive the next generation of healthcare?
The majority of investors say that the fundamental determaning factor for the success of a startup is the team behind it. Anyone can have a great idea, but if a teams lacks the proper funding, a solid engeneering core, and access to quality talent, the project will have a hard time succeeding. The plan was clear. 3fs (Iryo’s lead investor) was to lead in the funding and assemble a highly qualified and diverse team. With the current resources gathered, there is little doubt that Iryo will be successful in profoundly improving the current state of healthcare, one patient at a time.
Blockchain based projects and the wider use of crypto based tech are only at the forefront. In order to create something that will be highly functional in the future, one must build things that hardly exist in the present. This is how innovation traditionally works and this is how Iryo is approaching it. Iryo knows that effectively used medical data is priceless and can often lead to life-saving research. Iryo wants to contribute to the future of healthcare, in which patients, and institutions alike leverage their medical data to fundamentally improve the quality of life for every patient.
Iryo will be elaborating more about our ideas and the team’s progress in the upcoming months on our blog and social media channels. Join us and support our journey!
