The Medicalchain ICO launched February 1st and concluded that same day. The project is essentially a blockchain made specifically for health records. Despite the world being in an entire data revolution, medical data has yet to catch up with other industries. The current systems the industry uses are centralized, slow, and often extremely vulnerable. It can also take days for doctors’ offices to share records with one another.
BMJ, a U.K based publisher of medical journals and clinical research, published a podcast back on May 3rd, 2016 that states that in the U.S 250,000 patients die a year due to medical error. However, the U.S Center for Disease Control and Prevention does not classify medical errors on their list for death. If they were to add medical errors into the figures, it would be the 3rd largest killer annually in the United States. Martin Makary, a professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, believes that the CDC controls where most of the funding for research is going.
Currently, most funding is being allocated to the top two causes of death: heart disease and cancer. Since medical errors don’t appear, it doesn’t receive the attention it deserves.
Makary says:
“Unwarranted variation is endemic in health care. Developing consensus protocols that streamline the delivery of medicine and reduce variability can improve quality and lower costs in healthcare. More research on preventing medical errors from occurring is needed to address the problem.”
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Medicalchain
This is where Medicalchain steps in and can potentially help facilitate this problem. Medicalchain has nothing to do with the doctor making the medical decisions, but it does supply all providers with the full list of medical records for each patient. While there is no precise clinical evidence that shows fragmented medical data has led to death, a misinformed medical decision could have a serious impact on a patient’s life.
Medicalchain gives each patient a copy of their entire medical records at their fingertips, which is held and secured on the blockchain. They can distribute this information to providers they are seeing, instantly. The medical data is encrypted and these nodes, computers housing said data, are held at hospitals, universities, and non-profit organizations regulated to hold the sensitive data. The patient holds the private key that unlocks the data.
Medicalchain also provides telemedicine options that give the doctor your medical records instantly. The group behind the project is also working on medical records being stored in wearables, for patients who aren’t able to use cellular devices or happen to be unconscious.
The Medicalchain ICO launched today but it seems that, at time of reporting, their token portal is down. This could possibly be due to an influx of people on the site, given the fact that it’s the first date of launch. There is no current end date for this ICO.
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