The road to decentralized healthcare…

The MedCredits platform will be the first truly decentralized health network, and its first application will be in the rapidly expanding telemedicine market.

Telemedicine is the remote delivery of medical services to patients by means of telecommunications technology.

The global telemedicine market is currently valued between $18.2 billion and $51.3 billion, and is expected to grow around 25% per year to become a $200 billion market by the year 2024.

Despite this growth, centralized telemedicine has limitations. These include complex reimbursement plans, challenges with international payment, complicated regulations, middlemen fees and poor physician incentivization.

Many of these limitations can be overcome with decentralization:

• No middlemen
• No complicated reimbursement plans
• No overhead
• No expensive remittance fees

As the only decentralized telemedicine platform, we will have the first-mover advantage in capturing the telemedicine market. We will accomplish this in the following phases of business development:

• Hippocrates, the first release, aims to capture the teledermatology market. We chose dermatology because this field is the most accessible to telemedicine and presently has the largest market share. With just a photo and brief description, patients can obtain diagnoses from board certified dermatologists on demand. We will focus our initial efforts on releasing this platform that will have immediate real-world utility.
• 3rd party dapps will expand the MedCredits platform to encompass additional specialties in telemedicine. These include family medicine, psychiatry/psychology and pediatrics. Our goal is to grow the platform services organically while continually having a working product available for use.

Decentralized healthcare has only recently become technically feasible with blockchain integration in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. By strategically starting with a simple and cost-effective telemedicine platform, we will be the first-movers in a $200 billion dollar market. This is where the road to a decentralized healthcare system begins.