Iryo helps medical researchers while protecting your privacy

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Iryo Network

5 min readApr 20, 2018

Medical research is one of the core business models in the prevailing data economy. Research is needed to explore new treatments, new drugs, new medical procedures and new health politics that benefit us all.

Knowing the characteristics of a specific ailment, general side-reaction to a drug or getting general feedback from the field can help tremendously, improve further research and make it more cost effective.

Digital health industry presents both a danger and an opportunity for medical research. Since most of the data is being digitised, stored and compartmentalised, it is easier for the researchers to use it, analyze it and use it for the common good.

Data race is here

Many of the global governments are focusing on this matter.

Israel: Approximately NIS 1 billion ($286,490,000) has been budgeted for the plan which includes technological development, international cooperation, concentrated academic and industrial efforts and regulatory changes to encourage data research (source).

Hong Kong: Dr Cheung Ngai-tseung, the authority’s head of information technology and health informatics, said work on the platform had begun this year. “The Hospital Authority’s data will be made available to academia,” Cheung said. “The massive amount of data could facilitate machine learning.” (source)

And the states are not the only player in the field.

Drugmakers are racing to scoop up patient health records and strike deals with technology companies as big data analytics start to unlock a trove of information about how medicines perform in the real world. (source)

In early April, MSNBC reported that Facebook recently launched a project based in its secretive “Building 8” group to get hospitals to share anonymized patient data with them. The project was reportedly put on hold in the wake of the current scandal, but the stated plan was to match hospitals’ patient data on diagnoses and prescription information with Facebook so the company could combine that data with its own to construct digital profiles of patients. (source)

The data can actually be used for good.

Alzheimer: Currently, there’s no easy way to diagnose Alzheimer’s. No single test exists, and brain scans alone can’t determine whether someone has the disease. Instead, physicians have to look at a variety of factors, including a patient’s medical history and observations reported by family members or health-care workers. So machine learning could pick up on patterns that otherwise would easily be missed. (source)

Cancers: The chances of developing cancer in one’s lifetime are estimated to be as high as one in two (for US males). However, the industry is making rapid strides in combating and preventing these cancers. One of the key factors contributing to this war on cancer is the ability to gather large volumes of patient data during clinical trials, using sensors rather than surveys and interviews (source)

Medical data = personal data

We have focused on medical data abuses in our previous posts. Data is being used to target you with ads, data is being used to ruin your life. At the same time privacy is becoming more and more popular as a business advantage. So how to we separate the medical data from the personal data? We cannot. At least not entirely.

Medical records are usually filled with private information that connect to a specific person. Medical history details everything from your history, your current well-being and the potential exposure to certain diseases. Sharing all of this data presents a privacy threat to you and a data breach risk for your doctor.

Anonymisation of the said records does not work as well. Researches are showing that even with your records anonymised, on a large enough scale the connections can still be made. At the same time, once the data is travelling from one database to the next, it can still be intercepted in transit.

Iryo: Revolution on e-health medical records

Here is where Iryo comes into play. Rebuilding the e-health medical records from the ground up, Iryo is focusing on decentralised e-health medical records solution that benefits everybody.

Since the data is stored on patient device and requires the patient to authenticate every data request, you can rest assured your data is not going anywhere without your permission. At the same time, the researchers can request specific data points relevant to their research and the patient sends them results of the query without sending their own data at all or enabling the access to its entire medical record.

This changes the whole premise of e-health data that is currently in place which involves storing huge amount of toxic assets which in the end are not even needed for the actual research.

At the same time, participants in the Iryo network can use the IRYO tokens to either pay for their medical procedures, pay for the medical records data request or use the data to further their medical treatments.

This way, Iryo is helping out the medical researchers and at the same time helps the patients to protect their privacy and dignity.

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Iryo helps medical researchers while protecting your privacy

Data race is here

Medical data = personal data

Iryo: Revolution on e-health medical records

Written by Domen Savič