Web3 Might Be Good for Your Health

How Web3 will deliver your apple a day and what it means for the future of healthcare.

It appears to be only a matter of time until Web3 will be widespread in every aspect of our lives, from the way in which we interact with our Web3 communities to your fridge having a conversation with you about the distinctions between almond milk and soy milk. Currently, decentralized finance (DeFi) is dominating discussions on how blockchain will reshape industries.

There are many Web3 skeptics, some of whom have very good arguments. James Grimmelmann is a Cornell University professor who studies law and technology, and likes to call BS on the whole Web3 vibe. He calls it “vaporware” and accuses it of “promising an internet future that fixes everything people don’t like about the current internet, even when it’s contradictory.” He continues, “The vision says the problem with the internet is too many centralized intermediaries. Instead of having lots of different applications and sites, we’ll put it all on blockchains, which puts it all in one place.”

To Grimmelmann, Web3 represents technologists reaching for the idealistic ethos of the dawn of the internet — everyone can freely use the information superhighway! Long ago, this was overtaken by tech companies.

“The Internet’s evolution has always been a tug between fragmentation and centralization,” Grimmelmann grimly maintains. “When it swings too far in one direction, a backlash tries to pull it in the opposite direction. There are a lot of people who have money to invest,” he said. “And they need some vision to throw money at. Web3 is this vision.” As is so often the case, Web3 is neither a miracle cure for all that ails the internet, nor a totally empty buzzword devoid of use.

It’s also a case of technology sprinting ahead and internet law having to catch up, comparable to when Dolly the sheep was first cloned from a single somatic cell back in 1996. Who has the right to tokenize what is already a real issue in Web3?

Another ethics-laden sector to face disruption is the healthcare industry. Open wide, stick out your tongue, say “Ah,” and we’ll tell you more.

This Is Gonna Hurt: Hospital Hackers

We’ve seen big data growing exponentially over the years. If you believe that health records don’t mean anything, think again. Health record hacking is a hacker growth industry — and a very profitable one for the bad guys. Many hospitals have been hacked, with their systems shut down and patient records held as ransom. Can Web3 help?

Let’s fast-forward to the day in which every single one of your medical details will be stored in your phone or a wearable device. Every time you walk into any hospital in the world, the doctors can access all of your data in one place, without having to pull it out from different places. Sounds good? No more forms, right?

Medical Treatment and the Previous Generation of Internet

In its early days, Web1 content was decentralized, with users and organizations hosting data on personal servers. The information and websites were static, meaning that users could only navigate them, but couldn’t really interact. Remember AOL? That’s Web1. A medical example of Web1 is WebMD — also known as a hypochondriac haven, which convinces you that you have every disease in the known universe.

Web1 opened the floodgates of information that wasn’t previously accessible outside of communities of medical professionals. By 2001, a Pew report indicated that 52 million Americans had used the internet to find health or medical information. Granted, this new stream of information wasn’t always accurate or vetted; however, a new world of self-diagnosis was emerging nonetheless.

Web2 birthed new social interactions for patients with sites such as PatientsLikeMe and wearables. It was now possible to test your DNA with 23andMe. But, of course, you’re still giving them your data, which they could and would sell.

As Olivia Newton-John said, “Let’s get clinical! Clinical!”

So, how could we move from technological advances to actual clinical solutions?

Having a dependable, secure foundation that protects users has wider implications than you might think. Technologies such as language processing, AI, and machine learning have been held back due to fears regarding how their real-world adoption potentially violates user privacy, especially in an industry like healthcare, in which data security could be a matter of life and death.

Enter Web3

If all goes well, users will have power over their own data, while its functionality and overall dependability have endless potential in developing innovations and technologies that the world has never seen. Can you imagine it? Neither can we — for now. But hey, Web3 is still in its early stages. Let it grow!

In recent years, medical professionals have been manually collecting an ocean of medical data from clinics, hospitals, labs, pharmacies, and insurance companies. This doesn’t work well because it’s all over the place. It entails multiple facilities, numerous professionals, various languages, and different municipalities that don’t coordinate with each other. Most importantly, it isn’t accessible when needed most, costing money and lives.

Imagine your dream holiday in Bali turning into a nightmare in the blink of an eye with a gruesome crash. What if you lost consciousness and couldn’t tell the doctor that he shouldn’t give you NSAIDs because you have a severe allergy? Wouldn’t you be grateful for a decentralized database accessible on your phone or wearable? That database would tell the doctors your current medications, blood type, medication allergies, medical history, next of kin, insurance details, and other important details, regardless of what country you were in or in what language the data was originally recorded, thanks to smart translation technology.

MedRec Me

MIT Media Lab has been working on precisely this type of solution: MedRec, a private blockchain medical record system application based on Ethereum. It automatically keeps track of who has permission to view and change a record of medications that a person is taking.

As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies operate, MedRec also requires miners — generally medical researchers and professionals — to verify the data on the blockchain. It incentivizes the miners with access to aggregated, anonymized data from patients’ records that can be used for epidemiological studies (but only with patient consent). Win-win.

Another area for innovation is VR. In 2016, Dr. Shafi Ahmed, a surgeon, cancer specialist, and co-founder of Medical Realities, removed a colon tumor from a 70-year-old Londoner. What made this operation special was that Dr. Ahmed and his team performed the surgery with a 360-degree camera over the operating table, recording every incision in 4K, and live-streamed it to VR headsets globally. It was gruesome viewing, but very helpful if you’re an aspiring surgeon in a place that lacks infrastructure or training facilities. Imagine the potential of thousands of medical students across the globe receiving training from the world’s best surgeons and diagnosticians.

Matryx, an open-source VR platform, marries this idea with the blockchain by incentivizing collaboration in the fields of knowledge and creation, such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. For example, when there is an unsolved science problem, it will be posted on the platform for a verified solution, and users can collaborate to solve problems in VR and earn a reward for contributing.

This type of platform has immense potential if applied to Ahmed’s idea of teaching medical students around the world via VR. Ahmed and thousands of other doctors can collaborate to teach a variety of procedures in VR, and everything would be recorded on the blockchain to be accessed by every student.

Although we’re only seeing the tip of the scalpel with regard to Web3’s capabilities and impact, the time might come when patients and medical professionals across the globe will contribute their knowledge, expertise, or even illnesses to create better healthcare and put an end to “take two aspirin and call me in the morning” healthcare forever.