MediChain Leveraging the Blockchain to Transform the Healthcare Industry

The transformative power of blockchain is now coming to the healthcare sector. At present, patient data in electronic health records (EHR) and electronic medical records (EMR) are often incompatible and incomplete. The patients are also becoming increasingly concerned about data protection following reported data leaks and the cyber crime afflicting the sector. All this is about to change. According to a survey of 88 healthcare payers and 276 technology providers, experts, managers and IR specialists conducted by Black Book Market Research in Q3 2017, 19 percent of hospital executives (respondents in the survey) disclosed that they were considering the implementation of blockchain solutions in a bid to resolve these issues. While they are busy contemplating the next steps, the Medical Big Data Platform MediChain is already implementing an integrated plan to unleash the blockchain now.

The company is well placed, driven as it is by a team of professionals with both the required medical and big data experience, first and foremost MediChain CEO Doctor Mark Baker. Like other new players on the market, the company stores medical data in a way that enables patients to oversee and add to their personal data, select healthcare providers and decide what parts of their data to share both locally and internationally. However, as Dr. Baker notes, that is where the comparison ends:

“The MediChain Platform has been designed by people with experience in big data, as well as the development of pharmaceutical drugs and medical research in a number of key sectors.”

The company is targeting eight areas where it believes it can help to improve healthcare: predictive modeling for risk and resource use; population management; drug and medical device safety surveillance; disease and treatment heterogeneity; precision medicine and clinical decision support; quality of care and performance measurement; public health; and research applications. Doctor Baker is particularly bullish about the positive impact of predictive analytics in the healthcare sector:

“Predictive analytics drawing on big data technology learns from experience (data) and is thereby able to predict the future behavior of individuals and drive better decisions based on a comprehensive picture of associations among a significant proportion of the population or a vast geographic area.”

One hurdle that MediChain has encountered when applying blockchain technology to medical data applications is transaction speed. Dr. Baker notes that, unlike the Visa card system, which is capable of processing 24,000 transactions/second, Ethereum can only process 20 transactions/second. To address this issue, Dr. Baker is designing a patent-pending system which would permit parallel processing of the medical blockchain, potentially generating a 14,400 times increase in medical data transaction speed.

These speeds will facilitate the exchange of research and optimization of the benefits of big data, potentially bringing about breakthroughs for ailments such as arthritis and cystic fibrosis. The company plans to announce collaborative big data programs with a number of major healthcare and research institutions from Q2 2018. And that is not all. Dr. Baker revealed another area for cooperation:

“We are building close ties with other companies, for example, those involved in the deep learning artificial intelligence, developing fully autonomous systems for the interpretation of medical images.”

The company is currently conducting presale of its MediChain Utility Tokens (MCUs), in which it is being helped by ICOBox, the world’s leading provider of SaaS ICO solutions. And ICOBox co-founder Mike Raitsyn notes that they are happy to partner up for such a worthy cause:

“The digital revolution of the healthcare sector is long overdue. As an advisor to MediChain, I am constantly amazed at the innovation at the heart of the company and naturally at the way Dr. Baker and his team are implementing a ground-breaking new system to revolutionize the medical blockchain.”