OpenCare powered by MedX is now live on Ethereum Mainnet
After a year of development and four months of public testing, OpenCare is now live on Ethereum Mainnet! To our knowledge, this is the first ever healthcare application that uses Ethereum smart contracts to achieve true peer-to-peer consultations.
In the initial launch, OpenCare makes it possible for referring healthcare providers worldwide to quickly obtain diagnoses and recommendations from a global network of physician specialists.
About half of the world population — 3.8 billion people — do not have access to basic healthcare. Even fewer have affordable access to physician specialists, such as dermatology and ophthalmology. In the USA, according to HRSA, 28% of the population does not have access to specialty care.
Access to primary care is far from a guarantee that specialty care is available if needed.
OpenCare makes it possible for every primary care provider to treat ailments that would traditionally require separate visits with physician specialists.
Imagine primary care clinics now empowered with a user-friendly app that allows them to quickly access a global network of specialists via telemedicine. For any patient with, for example, a skin ailment, a primary care provider could use the app to snap some photos, provide a brief description and submit the case to a global network of board certified dermatologists attached with a small payment. Minutes later, a medical diagnosis and treatment plan will guide the primary care provider in prescribing treatment and follow-up. Primary care clinics that use OpenCare to support subspecialty services will be more convenient and affordable for patients — drawing larger patient volumes. Everybody wins.
On-boarding primary care providers to OpenCare is a big step toward adoption. While patients individually may only use a healthcare app a few times a year, primary care physicians encounter multiple patients daily who need specialist attention.
A good experience on OpenCare can result in a single primary care provider using the app hundreds of times a month.
With just 100 primary care providers worldwide on OpenCare, it would be possible for OpenCare to become one of the most popular dApps on DappRadar.
Why doesn’t Teladoc do this already?
Teladoc is presently the largest US telehealth company, and is valued at about 5 billion USD. As a centralized company that controls the storage of patient health information, Teladoc cannot launch a global healthcare market. The regulatory framework for cross-border telemedicine and 3rd party control of health information (e.g. intermediary between patient and physician) does not allow it.
OpenCare is different from Teladoc in that the entire encounter is controlled by the user. There is no company behind OpenCare that views or stores patient health information. OpenCare uses Ethereum smart contracts to guide the encounter, client-side encryption for health information and IPFS for decentralized cloud storage. This effectively makes OpenCare a “bulletin board” for healthcare services allowing it to bypass international barriers to cross-border telemedicine. The technology and infrastructure to build this didn’t exist 2 years ago. Now it does and OpenCare will be the first platform to make a global market in telemedicine.
OpenCare is available for public testing or use at opencare.medxprotocol.com. If your MetaMask or Coinbase dApp browser is on the Ropsten testnet, you will be able to demo the app for free, although you will not receive a true medical evaluation. However, for a small fee of 10 USD per evaluation, the live version is available on Ethereum mainnet.
OpenCare is just the first of many potential applications to be powered by MedX Protocol. As an open system, we look forward to working with health innovators around the world to launch healthcare dApps that eliminate intermediaries and artificial boundaries in today’s health systems.
About MedX Protocol
MedX is a permissionless protocol for launching medical dApps that connect patients and physicians worldwide for medical care. Applications on the MedX protocol can be used to eliminate intermediaries and international barriers to affordable care. OpenCare is the first dApp on MedX and creates a market for telemedicine that reduces global disparities in medical care. For more information, please visit us at https://medxprotocol.com/.
