MedX Protocol: Mission and Values
Decentralized projects are largely defined by their communities and the shared goals of all of those involved. At MedX, we have always understood the need for open communication and explicit, shared community goals. The majority of the MedX team has been deeply involved in the crypto space for nearly five years. As developers and the early guides of the MedX Protocol, our primary focus is on building great products that will improve the lives of many. However, before taking these roles, we were the early supporters and community members of other great projects that utilize the blockchain and digital assets to make positive differences. Our team has been on both sides. We hope through the sharing of our Mission and Values we can better communicate to the MedX community the fundamental ideas that guide our decision process as a team.
We understand the gravity of our early role as developers and guides of the initial formation of the MedX Protocol. Although we currently have significant influence over the direction of protocol development, this will not always be the case. We have now successfully launched OpenCare on mainnet as well as the beta release of our token-curated registry (TCR). As the MedX ecosystem and community begins to expand, the direction and future of the MedX ecosystem will be controlled by the community itself. The MedX Protocol will exist as a truly decentralized and globally distributed system governed by the users. This will be initially apparent in the beta release of our TCR whereby users are responsible for verifying the credentials of physician applicants. The user controlled aspect of the network is central to the MedX ecosystem and will continue to expand as the protocol matures and the community grows.
While the MedX team will continue to develop and release protocol advances and improvements, these upgrades will only be accepted with the support, testing and approval of the community. For this reason, we believe that it is imperative to clearly share our core mission and values with the community in hopes that these shared ideas will guide the MedX ecosystem as a whole for years to come.
The Problem
Affordable healthcare services are not available to all. The cost and accessibility of healthcare is limited not only by your income status but also by your geographical region. While some portion of this friction may be inherent to the demands of the medical profession and the limitation of available resources, a much greater degree is due to technological shortcomings, inefficient healthcare solutions and geographically fragmented, slow-moving regulations. These aspects of the healthcare market have minimized the supply, distribution and general affordability of medical services throughout the world. Medical services today are not available to the extent that a global, restriction-minimized system would allow. We believe that the use of a decentralized censorship-resistant solution necessitated by a sound blockchain allows for the creation of global free-market health solutions that maximize access and affordability of medical care.
Our Mission and Core Values
Our vision is of a world where access to health services is widespread and affordable, minimizing market inefficiencies and restrictions that inflate costs and reduce available care. We believe in the creation of a global, free-market driven health ecosystem in which neither geographical location nor artificial restrictions necessarily compromise access to appropriate medical services.
In accordance with the above beliefs, our mission statement reads as follows:
Build a global health system accessible by all.
We believe that the path to building this system requires the use of permissionless public blockchain infrastructure where information flows freely and all interested participants have access. Participants within this health system are not only owners of the system itself, but also the sole owners of their generated data such that they may freely grant or limit access to this information.
These closely held beliefs have helped shape the fundamental ideas of our core values.
1. Do right by the community
Decentralized projects are only as powerful as the communities that use and secure them. Projects that deliver long-lasting value to the community are best positioned to retain their supporters and further encourage an ever larger ecosystem of developers and users. These diverse participants then drive the value of the protocol as more useful products launch and economic activity within the system grows.
We strive to always do right by continuing to encourage the development of value-filled systems that can survive on long time horizons.
2. Give control to the users
A global open-access health system cannot be effectively maintained under the control of a single centralized party. Building quasi-decentralized systems that ultimately have central points of control is antithetical to the fundamental value proposition of permissionless systems. We are uninterested in contributing to a protocol that has significant central points of failure. Decentralized systems benefit remarkably from their open-access and permissionless nature. This right for users to access the network regardless of geographical location or specific restrictions is protected by the community alone. If this basic principle is upheld by the community, then we can be sure that MedX remains a protocol open to all.
We believe that the persistent ability for all people to access and utilize decentralized systems cannot be guaranteed by any central party and must be granted and protected by the users themselves. For this reason, these systems should not be under the control of a central entity but rather they should be wholly controlled by the users.
That is, a network users truly control.
3. Ship code frequently
We have consistently released updates to our core protocol to the best of our ability in accordance with our roadmap. This dedication to ship has allowed us to be among a growing group of projects that have delivered usable applications on mainnet. With the release of OpenCare on mainnet and our TCR in beta, we are committed to shipping protocol updates.
Additionally, as the MedX community grows, we will continue to encourage development from a diverse set of global developers looking to utilize the MedX protocol to launch their own distributed healthcare applications.
To find out more about the MedX Health System, please join the discussion on our Telegram or join our mailing list!
