Blockchain Health Introduction Part 1: Data Collection

Thanks for reading! This post will walk you through the motivations for founding Blockchain Health and our plans for the future! Please excuse the brevity, it's mostly cribbed from a deck that @jgcrossman created to explain the company to investors.

Our Plan

We intend to change the way Personal Health Data is:

1. Collected
2. Stored
3. Used
4. Transferred

• We can build a better future with today's technology:
  • Powerful handheld computers
  • Encrypted storage
  • Device-oriented identity model
  • Encrypted point-to-point communications
  • Blockchain-based Public Notary to establish audit trails for chain of custody of digital information

I'll go though these one at a time.

Health Data Collection is Analog, Sporadic and Expensive

Health Data as it's used today is mostly collected and manually digitized by medical staff at the doctor's office, in the hospital, etc. This is entered directly into the Electronic Medical Record software that they use to keep records of care for historical, billing and liability purposes. This is often shared with the patient via a portal that almost nobody accesses.

Our Goals for Health Data Collection

The nexus of data collection is your smartphone. It already gets mood and productivity data from your email and social media usage, and information regarding physical activity from it's onboard accelerometer, GPS, and devices like a smartwatch or a fitbit. Long term, we'd like to include your data from lab tests and patient portals from your health treatment, but the daily activity is already a fantastic start.

In the next few posts, I'll talk about how that data is stored, transferred and used, and how a decentralized model focused on user devices and the Blockchain can improve both patient privacy and data availability for research.

Upvote, follow and comment to get the rest of the series!