What makes Health Nexus different than Ethereum?
I often get questions asking us what the difference is between Health Nexus and this-or-that project. I want to answer that in this article, however I’m not going to be talking so much about what makes our project different; that would require I cover our incredible team, our unique qualifying experience, our strategic partners, and our world-class advisers. I’ll leave that task for another team member and will instead narrow my response to how our technology is different.
Most of the time when we get that question Health Nexus is being compared with a healthcare-related decentralized application (dapp). In the broadest sense, if they are showing you a user interface, a mobile app, or something that looks like an application then that is something that could run on Health Nexus. Health Nexus supports all kinds of healthcare applications because it is a blockchain like Ethereum.
Anyone who wants to offer a decentralized application for healthcare will be able to use Health Nexus to support their decentralized requirements. We see all these healthcare dapps as potential partners not as competition.
Sometimes though the comparison is between Health Nexus and another actual blockchain and in that case the answer depends on the differences in the underlying technology or how the technology will change over time. For practical reasons I’m going to answer the question by contrasting Health Nexus with Ethereum. That should provide you enough information to compare Health Nexus with any other project.
How are Health Nexus and Ethereum Similar?
Here at SimplyVital Health we’re big fans of Ethereum and the incredible community that surrounds it. When looking at technology that was tried and tested, that had forward momentum, and that had significant efforts being applied to the scaling issues Ethereum stood out. That’s why we selected it as the foundation for Health Nexus.
Health Nexus is a fork of the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is a blockchain like Bitcoin with an added virtual machine that runs code stored on the blockchain, called smart contracts. These smart contracts can be used for creating decentralized applications. Things Health Nexus has in common with Ethereum include:
- Smart Contracts
- Open source
- Free to develop on
- Proof-of-Stake Planned
So Health Nexus and Ethereum are very similar, however healthcare technology and the regulations around healthcare required us to make some changes. Let’s get into those.
So how is Health Nexus different?
There are some rather significant differences between Health Nexus and Ethereum because we are building Health Nexus to meet and exceed healthcare industry requirements. They are:
Governance Protocol
Decentralized governance is built into the protocol though executive accounts that are able to participate in a democratic governing process. The consortium will be responsible for establishing standards, certifying and whitelisting miners and data nodes, and proposing and voting on protocol updates. You can read more about our governance changes.
HIPAA Compliant Nodes
Unlike Ethereum where anyone with enough power can mine blocks, to mine blocks on Health Nexus a node will have to pass HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) certification and be whitelisted by an executive account in compliance with the validation standards established by the governing consortium. This increases the security of the blockchain and meets healthcare regulations.
Decentralized Record Management
The most common requirement for a decentralized healthcare applications is securely exchanging medical data. Our protocol adds a key pair system so that accounts can create and permission multiple keys, and use those keys to verify blockchain identity as part of responding to secure request to offchain data. This provides protocol-level support to decentralized record management. You can read more about our key pair system.
Decentralized Storage and Responsive Data Events
Data storage contracts and corresponding decentralized data storage allows decentralized applications to store more data than is practical on the blockchain alone. Combined with data-aware smart contract events, and contract-paid transactions, smart contracts will be able to respond in real-time to partnered systems creating or modify data.
So what’s the bottom line?
The changes we are making to Health Nexus will make blockchain technology safe for the healthcare industry. We believe that will make Health Nexus dapps easier to integrate and faster to sell to healthcare providers and give software providers delivering dapps on Health Nexus a competitive advantage.
For more information about Health Nexus checkout our other articles or visit our token sale site. If you have questions about Health Nexus checkout our whitepaper or find us in our telegram group.
About SimplyVital Health:
SimplyVital Health is making decentralized technology accessible to the healthcare industry by creating Health Nexus, a healthcare-grade blockchain and paired data storage. Their principal application, ConnectingCare, augments existing hospital care systems to extract data and create care pathway flexibility, prospectively track financials, maintain immutable records, and accurately monitor analytics.
