Parcel Spotlight: Ruyi Health
An in depth look at some of the projects building on Parcel.
We’re excited to spotlight Ruyi Health, a team focusing on bridging the gap between technology and autonomy over individual health care. Their application solution offers a definitive and streamlined approach to health management, while preserving and protecting patient data. This secure exchange of health information creates a more informed and educated patient, strengthens the network of healthcare professionals and systems, and brings about a new future of value-based care.
Who are you! Tell us about yourself and Oasis Labs’ partnership with Ruyi Health
Our names are Zhenxuan “James” Zhang and Shaashwat Sharma, and we are the co-founders of Ruyi Health LLC. We both noticed there was a lack of accessible patient-focused preventative healthcare solutions. We decided to utilize our background in tech to solve this problem, which led us to founding Ruyi Health in February 2020. We joined Oasis Labs’ DevAccelerator in June 2020, and since then have been working on creating a secure, intuitive, and intelligent health management solution that empowers our users to live healthy lives. We are excited to share that we have hired our first employee, Mia Ladolcetta, and are on track to releasing our solution.
Tell us a little bit about Ruyi Health
While developing robotic technology for stroke rehabilitation and interacting with patients, James noticed that while most of the investment and attention is given to reactionary medicine, the most effective way to reduce cost and improve rehabilitation outcomes is to take a preventative approach. As a result, we are starting off by building a preventative health management solution tailored to users such as stroke survivors. The solution will help them manage their blood pressure, medication intake, and other key health factors. Users will be able to see how their overall health has changed over time and identify recurrent symptoms and other patterns in their health, which can be brought to the attention of their doctors. In the future, we envision expanding this solution to other chronic conditions, developing a provider-facing portal, exploring hardware integration with smart blood pressure devices, and taking advantage of interoperability to share data to and from various electronic health records.
Why is privacy and data sovereignty important for your product?
Recently, there have been many large-scale breaches of sensitive medical data. Consequently, patients are concerned about keeping their data secure and are wary of entering sensitive data into an untrusted app. Additionally, patients want to have control over who to share their data with while still reaping the benefits of sharing their data with those they trust (doctors, therapists, family members, etc.).
Our app collects health data, generates health reports, and allows sharing these reports with other people. Therefore, privacy and data sovereignty are paramount to its success.
How did you find out about Oasis Labs?
James was introduced to Dr. Dawn Song’s seminal papers in a security class at his grad school, which is how we found out about Oasis Labs and the DevAccelerator program. After reading more about the company, we identified it as a natural fit because we have an overlapping goal of privacy-first data ownership.
What made Parcel a good fit for you? / How do you use Parcel?
We knew Parcel would be a great fit for our solution for the following reasons:
- It allows us to address patients’ security concerns, leading to increased adoption rates.
- It prevents one centralized party from having the ability to access unauthorized data.
- It allows for conducting data analysis and sharing health reports without revealing identifiable information to untrusted entities.
Currently, we are using Parcel to store sensitive user data, which is necessary to generate private health reports. In the future, we want to use Parcel to enable selective data sharing and confidential data analysis.
What’s your favorite thing about Parcel!
Our favorite thing about Parcel is its ease of use. We were able to integrate the entire user authentication, consent management, and data uploading workflow in just a few lines of code. We are especially pleased with how each update of Parcel reduces the length and complexity of our code! Additionally, the Parcel dev team has been outstanding at answering our questions, walking us through implementations of new features, and taking our feedback and feature requests into consideration.
We are most excited to start our exploration of using Parcel’s consent management tools to allow users to selectively share data with trusted groups.
Who inspires you?
We are inspired by the stroke survivors whom we have had the privilege of meeting while conducting customer discovery research. They face a wide variety of challenges such as paralysis, mental fatigue, and chronic pain. Yet, many survivors have a positive outlook and take steps towards recovery, even when they are feeling tired or discouraged. They choose to participate in support groups and are kind enough to talk to us about their problems and share thoughts on our solution. We hope our solution will help empower them to live a healthier life.
If you’re interested in testing the Ruyi Health app, head to their website: https://ruyihealth.org/ or contact them at info@ruyihealth.org!
Curious about Parcel’s upcoming data tokenization features? Read our updated primer here.
