Author: Patientory

Last week, Patientory CEO Chrissa McFarlane presented Patientory as a finalist in the 1776-MedStar #Patient2Consumer Challenge in Washington, DC. Although we did not win the grand prize, we received the next best thing. recognition!

In the end, the judges named Patientory an “Innovation Mention.” That means we get the opportunity to propose a future pilot to MedStar Health in collaboration with other strategic partners. It’s an honor, and we’re delighted by their recognition of Patientory’s promise.

Out of hundreds of entrants, Patientory made the cut as part of the final 15 challengers. Thank you to MedStar Health and 1776 for providing this opportunity.

Like most people, we too have come away from interactions with the healthcare system all too often feeling exasperated and angry. When comparing personal and professional experiences, the root causes immediately have become clear: healthcare is not personal and there is no central depository of our own health information.

First, it’s important to take a wider perspective and understand the 3 challenges plaguing our healthcare system:

1. The system currently lacks any sort of centralized depository for personal health information (PHI). Without this depository, PHI is unevenly distributed, frustratingly duplicated among care teams, and needlessly cumbersome to access.
2. Patients do not own their PHI. In an environment where patients and caregivers are being asked to coordinate among larger care teams, this has led to frustration, decreased quality of care, and increased hospital readmissions (which also lead to more fines for hospitals)..
3. Technology to safely secure PHI is largely absent, unable to scale, or has proven ineffective. This has led to record fines, increased costs, and increased vulnerability to cyberattacks such as ransomware.

Patientory aims to answer these challenges with a system that works for both patients and doctors:

• Patientory’s mobile app allows patients to create an individual profile. On this profile, they store their medical information on a secure, HIPAA-compliant blockchain platform. Then they can connect with care providers as well as other patients who have similar health issues or concerns. This allows patients greater control over their overall health across multiple care teams, both inside and outside the hospital.
• Doctors (and their healthcare organizations) use Patientory to get the patient’s complete and up-to-date medical history. In addition, Patientory utilizes blockchain to keep PHI secure, mitigate damaging data breaches, and even execute smart contracts at every stage of the patient care billing and payment cycle.

While many have come forward to support our optimistic vision of a more personal healthcare system, others have sprung up with a skeptical eye. How can you expect to succeed, they ask, when others have already failed? There are four ways to answer this question:

• The timing is right.
  For healthcare organizations, the situation is growing increasingly fraught. Ransomware like WannaCry are no longer relegated to the relative obscurity of info security blogs. Instead, news about ransomware is loudly broadcasted on mainstream global news outlets like CNN and the BBC.
• The technology is finally mature.
  Instead of having one central administrator act as a gatekeeper to data, blockchain deploys one shared ledger spread across a network of synchronized, replicated databases visible to anyone with the authorized access. It is virtually impossible for a cyber criminal to hack one block in the chain without simultaneously hacking every other block in the chain’s chronology. This makes blockchain incredibly appealing to not only store a patient’s entire health history, but determine who should have access to it.
• We take a different approach.
  We have deliberately chosen a path that does not require healthcare IT executives to impose a new solution or dispose of their legacy capital investments. Instead, our system is a bridge that seamlessly integrates with existing EMR systems such as Meditech, EPIC, Allscripts, and Cerner. In addition, we leverage smarter technologies such as machine learning and AI to help provide better care treatment plans, which promote better health outcomes.
• Patients are demanding to own their own data.
  From Fitbits to fitness apps, a plethora of products have ushered in the age of the quantified self. Patients – both healthy and ill – are accustomed to owning their health data and are now demanding healthcare organizations unlock their silos. Our app lets patients create a universal profile to keep track of their entire health history. The will provide an easy and hassle free way of tracking doctor visits, medical bills, personal medical information, insurance, immunizations and pharmacy medications. All of this information can then be shared with other providers, labs and diagnostic services.

Join the Mission
We invite you to join our mission to make healthcare more personal:

• Let’s empower patients globally by giving them access to their health information.
• Let’s connect patients with their many caregivers for improved health outcomes.
• Let’s give doctors and healthcare organizations the safety and security of lower risk of cyberattacks and lower costs.

By doing all of this, we not only make healthcare more personal, but improve quality of care and well being for all.

We are pleased to announce that Patientory has been named as a finalist in the 1776-MedStar #Patient2Consumer Challenge in Washington, DC on July 13, 2017. Out of hundreds of entrants, Patientory made the cut as part of the final 15 challengers. We will go to head-to-head with other startups to convince a panel of judges whose ideas will most shape the future of health.

The winning startups will receive prizes and the opportunity to incubate ideas or further develop their companies as part of MedStar’s Innovation Lab cohort.

UPDATE: See the results here.

Recent ransomware cyber-attacks have exposed a vulnerable global healthcare IT infrastructure. Personal Health Information data is at risk. Unfortunately, legacy systems now administrate Personal Health Information (PHI) across siloed database networks. Fragmented Electronic Medical Records (EMR) create cumbersome access points and data exchanges are fraught with friction. Patientory is a patient-centered enterprise solution designed to eliminate many of these pain points.

Patientory uses blockchain technologies to ensure end-to-end encryption while adhering to region-specific regulatory guidelines and compliance requirements. Our solution design uses encrypted middleware to meet the high-volume demands of modern day HealthcareIT. Ultimately, Patientory empowers patients, clinical care teams, and insurance providers to overcome many challenges faced within current decentralized environments.

The goal of this post is to provide insights to our platform architecture. This post assumes general knowledge of hardware security models, identity platforms, cloud computing and enclaves (secure elements).

Introducing the Middle-Tier to Blockchain

Many of the early challenges developing blockchain proof of concepts (POCs) for the enterprise revolved around two prominent concerns: scaling and privacy. In addition, the limited two-tiered architecture (client/server) presents version control issues and is difficult for in-house IT teams to implement. Poor key management also is also catastrophic for early adopters.

With time and a maturation of the technology, however, has come evolution and the use of a middle-tier in blockchain architecture. This has enabled in-house teams to develop application functionality and feature sets using familiar tools and languages. This multilevel framework provides a separation of concerns (middleware) similar to modern web infrastructures. The middle layer allows the platform to interface with existing systems and scale more efficiently off-the-chain. The business logic (smart contracts) flows securely on and off the blockchain.

How Does Patientory Fit Into the Picture?

Patientory creates, configures, and query blockchain-enabled smart contracts that leverage both “traditional” cloud middleware and new application services to support blockchain development for nodes on and off the chain. Within this framework, the implementation of modern application services like biometrics and OAuth, real-time data and billing, and personal health insurance information are now possible. Applications can be developed using standard development tools, reducing time-consuming learning curves for onboarding and implementation.

Big Data applications on the Patientory platform is also implemented and executed more expeditiously a with three-tiered architecture. Using this framework, our roadmap can expand to include ingesting Big Data from multiple sources. Harnessing this data will unearth valuable insights for clinical care teams, as well as healthcare intelligence with actionable analytics for better patient outcomes.

How We Envision the Patientory Framework

Please see the infographic below for an illustration of the Patientory framework.

• First, we start with the presentation layer. This is the user touchpoint for accessing their healthcare information in real time. Prescription adherence alerts, wearables data, Explanation of Benefits (EOB), and real-time data can be found here. Hospitals, Clinical Care providers and other enterprise members interface here as well exchanging information securely in the P2P network.

• Second tier: Middleware. Oracles execute in a secure computational environment, and have the cryptographic primitives that allow them to work directly with blockchains. On the platform, business logic executes in a fabric that binds the code to a smart contract.  Identity and key management, cryptographic,services,attested data and interaction with the outside world runs in this secure environment.

• Third tier: Data Layer and Schema. This third layer serves as a distributed database of the shared truth between nodes on the blockchain. The ledger is an instantiation of a version specific contract between several different parties. Smart contracts are bound by the ledger, schema, counterparties, logic, and external sources. The platform is fully auditable and can serve to automate many healthcare operational processes.

Looking Ahead

We are confident that Patientory helps move HealthcareIT into the future. It’s not only long overdue, but the increasing amount of ransomware incidents demands it. Let me know if you feel the same.

Jesse Brown,
Chief Technology Officer
Patientory

Patientory was recently highlighted in a story by The CoinTelegraph about non-financial blockchains and called “a cutting edge development in medicine.”

Patientory, a recently launched free-to-use app, is an example of Blockchain’s influence in this area. Users can create a profile in the app and keep track of their medical history. The app eliminates the chance of having this data suffer any kind of cyber attack. All the changes in the records can be seen online.

Read more: http://bit.ly/nonfinancialblockchains

We’re honored and delighted to see our CEO and Founder, Chrissa McFarlane, highlighted by Blockchain Healthcare Review and Brennan Bennett as an entrepreneur “focused on solving healthcare with Blockchain.”

The Blockchain is a technology that is open to all. It does not discriminate based on age or gender and is built around mathematical concepts and technology. It is behind the rise of crypto-currency tokens, which are the lifeblood of monetizing blockchain innovation. The industry young, and many new companies and founders with great ideas are entering and making a large impact. For that reason, many female founders are having a big impact on the blockchain industry by founding new companies and driving new ventures.

[…]

…a discussion in women driven blockchain entrepreneurship can not be complete without mentioning the recent, and ongoing success, of Chrissa McFarlane, CEO of Patientory.

Read the full story: http://bit.ly/2sNpVA

We’re very excited to note that our CEO, Chrissa McFarlane, and our team are attending the Blockchain Vendor Showcase event today at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They’re scheduled to talk Patientory, how it works, and even how the platform makes global data available in real time. That’s especially valuable in a world where time is critical in tracking a virus like Zika.

The CDC is the leading national health institute in the United States.  It is a federal agency under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services. Its headquarters are located near us in Atlanta.