Category: Patients

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Blockchain Covid-19 Healthcare Providers Patients Public Health

Commercially Successful Blockchain Healthcare Projects

Patientory is on the top 10 list of successful blockchain companies that are thriving today and has an established blockchain that empowers users to own their health data securely. 

Background:

The healthcare industry is the new frontier for blockchain technology. Given its properties of  im-mutability and decentralization, blockchain represents an opportunity for an unprecedented level of  privacy and security for all stakeholders by ensuring data integrity while giving patients control over their own health data. On a backdrop of  rising interest in blockchain in general and blockchain healthcare applications in particular, there has been a proliferation of  blockchain healthcare projects over the past few years. 

Review

Blockchain in Healthcare Today (BHTY) aims to review to identify and understand real-world blockchain healthcare projects that have attained commercial success in the highly competitive blockchain market. This review revealed that blockchain health projects currently comprise a small fraction of the overall number of commercially successful blockchain projects. However, because this sub-industry is still in its early stages, there are reasons to be optimistic that many more blockchain health projects will emerge and attain commercial success in future. Findings from this review done from an entrepreneurial perspective should help with the identification of future projects most likely to succeed.

Blockchain in Clinical Trials Patientory, Inc. 

As part of the continuous effort and response to Covid 19, Patientory assisted Moderna and Novavax  in recruiting for underrepresented and at risk communities at risk for Covid 19. Read more about it here. 

For the complete review, https://bit.ly/3sEQeVq

About The Journal

Blockchain in Healthcare Today is the world’s first peer review journal that amplifies and disseminates distributed ledger technology research and innovations in the healthcare sector. The  preeminent open-access journal facilitates sharing, discussion and consensus building for a multi-disciplinary market across a global community of stakeholders engaged in discovering, implementing and modernizing quality affordable health systems and care for health citizens. The journal is published on a continuous basis in order to accelerate sharing rigorously vetted theoretical and experiential knowledge required for a growth sector. A world-class peer-review board endeavors to offer rapid peer review and includes constructive commentary to strengthen work.

About Patientory Inc:

Patientory democratizes individual ownership of the world’s health data and incentives to improve health outcomes. Patientory Inc. is a population health data management and analytics company. Through its two decentralized applications, the Patientory mobile app and enterprise software tool Neith, Patientory Inc. provides patients with ownership and insights and enterprises with comprehensive healthcare data intelligence. This is achieved by integrating a blockchain enabled network to gather and analyze siloed healthcare data, which includes daily lifestyle factors, and in turn, reduce the cost of care.

More about the article, please visit here,

https://blockchainhealthcaretoday.com/index.php/journal/article/view/166

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Blockchain Healthcare Providers Patients Public Health

Integrations of SDOH into Healthcare Technology

Patients are people first; treating them holistically requires the use of insights derived from both clinical and non-clinical data. To achieve full integration of SDOH into healthcare true collaboration among clinical and social entities are a necessary step in redefining how healthcare serves its people.

Today, Screening for social determinants of health(SDOH)is increasingly done in primary and specialty care settings. Payers and health care organizations have recognized the importance of these determinants not just to clinical outcomes but also to cost and use of services. Toward that end, both clinical and financial cases have been made for an expanded focus on SDOH for many, if not all, patients. However, a part from system challenges, one of the biggest challenges that this will have moving forward towards patient populations is one of ethics and the acceptance of appropriate standardization processes and guidelines. Some SDOH is driven by complex social and structural factors, such as racism immigration status, and may be difficult to describe in a diagnostic construct such as ICD-10.

Creating a “perfect” bridge between the medical and social construct specifically for an individual is not an easy feat oftentimes burdened with gaining access to information deemed more sensitive that individuals would want to share in an office visit. Health has deep roots in communities, non-healthcare institutions, policies, and social hierarchies such as those posed by race, class, and gender. Quantifying that complexity is difficult and needs cooperation from these organizations. When asked which non-medical barriers to care or health the respondents’ organizations plan to act on in the next year, Nearly two-thirds (63.7%) of respondents named care coordination, a traditional companion service to direct medical care, as a key to overcoming barriers. It is important to note in order to achieve full integration of SDOH into healthcare to overcome ethical barriers, compliance, and social constructs true collaboration and partnership among entities serviced by individuals are a necessary step in redefining how healthcare cares for the people it is intended to serve.

You can read the complete journal about the intersection of Blockchain and SDOH at here

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DApps Partners Patients Public Health

Patientory Partnership with Trialscope

We’re super excited to announce that Patientory is now partnered with Trialscope, a company that transforms trials through transparency.

TrialScope unlocks clinical trials access to patients for Pharmaceutical Companies. TrialScope is the most widely adopted clinical trials transparency platform, supported by leading subject-matter experts, TrialScope offers technologies and partnership unprecedented in the industry.

The Patientory partnership with Trialscope will bring the best solutions and patient populations together to accelerate the clinical trial process. Patientory users will receive first-hand access to cutting edge clinical trials. 

About Trialscope:

TrialScope unlocks clinical trial data superpowers. The TrialScope Transparency CloudTM makes centralizing, structuring and activating clinical trial information simple, for use across the organization and at every stage of the study. Our integrated platform is used by 16 of the top 20 clinical trial sponsors in the world, who rely on TrialScope to ensure disclosure compliance, maximize trial transparency, improve patient engagement and accelerate study recruitment. To learn more, visit TrialScope.com

About Patientory:

Patientory empowers healthcare systems, providers, and consumers with a single, secure application for sharing healthcare data, providing unprecedented insight into each patient’s health and resulting in better, healthier outcomes.  Patientory’s applications provide increased insight into an individual’s health management and empowers people to make better decisions, coordinate between care providers, and receive better care overall.

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Coronavirus Covid-19 Healthcare Providers Patients Public Health

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) MythBusters

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a novel coronavirus.

The disease causes respiratory illness (like the flu) with symptoms such as a cough, fever, and in more severe cases, difficulty breathing. You can protect yourself by washing your hands frequently, avoiding touching your face, and avoiding close contact (1 meter or 3 feet) with people who are unwell. 

WHO Health Alert for coronavirus launches on WhatsApp

To increase access to reliable information, WHO worked with WhatsApp and Facebook to launch a new WHO Health Alert messaging service. The WhatsApp-based service will provide vital information about COVID-19 to millions of people through their mobile phones. The services use an AI chatbot to provide updated information on the pandemic, including how to protect yourself, questions and answers, and the latest news and press coverage. 

The Health Alert service is now available in English and will be introduced in other languages this coming week. This is part of WHO’s a wider initiative to work with technology companies to get accurate health information into the hands of people that need it at this critical time.

Get WhatsApp Updates

Most importantly, we hope that you and your family are safe and remain healthy.

Please consult a doctor if you experience serious symptoms for the disease otherwise stay home and stop the spread.

Here is a list of statements intended to dispel myths about the COVID-19 disease: 

  1. From the evidence so far, the COVID-19 virus can get transmitted everywhere, including hot and humid areas.
  2. Hand dryers and hot baths cannot kill the virus; nor will standing in the sun
  3. Drinking lots of water will not flush out the virus. Eating ice cream won’t freeze the virus either
  4. The virus cannot be transmitted through mosquito bites
  5. Cleaning your nose with soap or sanitizer will not kill the virus
  6. Spraying yourself with or drinking alcohol will not kill the virus
  7. Having lots of vitamin and herbal supplements might build immunity, but will not protect you from getting infected
  8. Holding your breath for 10 seconds without coughing is not a way to confirm whether or not you are infected with COVID-19. The test needs to be done by a medical practitioner. Results take 24 hours
  9. There is no scientific evidence to suggest that cow urine or crushed bull horn can protect a person from the virus.
  10. Flu vaccines do not protect against COVID-19
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Blockchain DApps Interns Patients Public Health

Patientory Summer Interns 2019

National Intern Day, which is the third Thursday in July, was started in 2017 and was created to recognize interns for all of the hard work that they do. In celebration of this day, this year, we’ve had the pleasure of having seven students from Georgia State University’s Clinical Informatics Department working with us as part of the Patientory internship program.

Internship Program

Our summer internship program this year ran for 6 weeks. Seven students were chosen to join us at the Atlanta Tech Village the 4th largest startup co-worker hub in the United States. 

Partnership with Georgia State University

Our new partnership with Georgia State University Byrdine F. Lewis School of Nursing provides their students with clinical informatics experience to aid in preparing a workforce for advancing the future of healthcare delivery.

Health Informatics Graduates

Health informatics as an industry is still in its infancy. Healthcare providers were slow to adopt clinical information systems at the point of care. Only now, because federal requirements accelerated the implementation of electronic health records, is the industry starting to evolve. Now that all this health information is in electronic form, the ability to analyze this immense volume of data has created new opportunities to improve care. That’s why the federal government is predicting such huge growth in this area over the next decade. In fact, the major issue that the industry is now facing is the lack of individuals with training and experience to fill the many open positions. 

There were seven interns along with their supervisors and other leaders in attendance. They are studying the field of health informatics, the design, and implementation of IT-related in health care at Georgia State University, the public research university in Atlanta, Georgia. 

  1. Thuy DoTran
  2. Yemuda Killen
  3. Tram Bui
  4. Xueling Wang
  5. Quynh Nguyen
  6. Salman Simjee
  7. Olivia Collins

Part of the internship program consisted of the interns giving short presentations about what they learned throughout the course of their internship, and how they will use their new skills in their future careers.

One of these interns, Salman Simjee, described our company culture as, “[The] team is very open and supportive. They were always present to listen to our questions and provided us with insights about the industry.”

“The company culture is nice and respectable as well as the people who work at the Atlanta Tech Village.“ Quynh Nguyen. 

New Horizons

Interns learned more about how clinical informatics can improve the overall patient experience such as,

  1. Technology APIs electronic medical records integrations (HL7/FHIR, etc)
  2. KPIs (based on electronic data)/CHF disease states examples
  3. Nursing informatics and Smart FHIR training recommendations
  4. What is being offered by other patient centric healthcare IT as Analytics
  5. Analytic visualizations for both mobile and enterprise

And a lot more!

Final Day

Most of the interns already knew what they wanted to pursue coming into the internship. Tram Bui says she pursued Clinical Informatics at Georgia State University to become a healthcare data analyst and the patientory internship program helped her to kick start her dreams.

On the final day of the program, all our interns shared feedback about how their internship helped them figure out what career path they want to take.

We expect that number to continue to increase, by next summer, 2020.

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Blockchain DApps Healthcare Providers Patients

CASE STUDY: Forging The Path To Consumer-Directed Health Through Blockchain Technology

Overview and Background

Despite incredible advancements over the last decade in converting paper healthcare records into digital data, a vast majority of consumers lack access to their electronic medical records. Sadly, many people cannot manage their healthcare records any better than they could a decade ago or even three decades ago. While it can be easy for some to point the finger at the bureaucracy and red tape of healthcare institutions, the truth is that many of these institutions would like to share data with their patients but don’t have a secure and easy way to do this. This challenging dynamic is because many medical providers use different electronic health record (EHR) systems that actually may not be able to communicate with one another easily. The resulting situation has become a significant problem where patients are caught in the middle of the healthcare industry’s lack of interoperability and without solutions that can provide patients accessible and secure healthcare data.

Patientory DApp Solution

Patientory, a digital health company based in Atlanta, Georgia, has developed a distributed application DApp solution that provides individual consumers with quick, easy, and secure access to their healthcare data. As the industry leader for DApp blockchain solutions, Patientory recently developed the first version of its beta DApp for consumers.

Patientory’s DApp leverages blockchain technology, which is an open and secure technology that captures transaction records on blocks that are connected and stores them on a distributed and encoded database that acts as a ledger. Blockchain has incredible security benefits as the records are spread across a replicated database network in which all the databases are in sync. Users, however, can only access the blocks to which they have permission to. Lastly, all the transactions that happen over blockchain are date and time stamped.

As for DApps, they are applications that interface with blockchains which are not stored or controlled by a single entity or in a single location. This means that a particular EHR or healthcare provider does not solely control an individual’s healthcare data, thus allowing for more efficient, user-friendly, and secure sharing of healthcare data among different providers
and EHR platforms.

This new DApp solution was created from research data Patientory has collected over the past few years regarding the challenges that healthcare consumers face on a regular basis and how these challenges have evolved over time. With the DApp solution, Patientory’s goal is to create a one-stop-shop solution for healthcare consumers, where they can access their health information, engage in health-related transactions, and become empowered to improve their health by having the necessary data and tools to do so.

The DApp Beta Test

To evaluate the DApp’s product-market fit and overall effectiveness as a solution, Patientory initiated a beta test project with specific goals outlined. The goals of their research were:

  • To verify the efficacy of the distributed App
  • To seek insight into the interface’s user acceptance and general quality
  • To examine product functionality in real-world user environments and test the necessary support infrastructure
  • To collect customer suggestions and testimonials, test the profile establishment protocols and the goal-setting, activity tracking, and wallet functionalities alongside the data storage protocols for securing personal health information (PHI) within the PTOYNET™ private permissioned blockchain
  • To identify opportunities for future development regarding desirable user features and functionality

To best accomplish their goals, 80 beta users were selected to use the app for three months in all functionality areas from setting goals, tracking fitness activities, traveling internationally and utilizing the wallet feature with Dash and PTOY cryptocurrencies. The demographics and personas of the beta users were primarily affluent, health-conscious iPhone owners, with a majority owning one or more cryptocurrencies. These individuals are primarily based in the US, with a majority located in the urban settings of New York City, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles, as well as non-US countries including the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland as well as India and Asia. At the end of the three months, the beta users were then
given a detailed survey requesting their feedback on their experience with the DApp solution.

DApp Beta User Survey Results

The below results a summary of key user feedback that Patientory received:

  • The DApp is relevant and engaging.
    • 90% of respondents found the entire app useful with no elements irrelevant.
    • 80% of respondents said that they did not find any parts of the app unnecessarily complicated.
    • More than half of respondents found the app ‘very engaging.’
  • Users found DApp most useful for fitness-related activity.
    • Respondents reported that goal-setting for walking and exercise was the most useful aspect of DApp.
    • Respondents also showed interest in nutrition tracking. While 80 percent of respondents reported that they track walking or steps, 60 percent reported tracking food and hydration
  • DApp is easy and fast to install and use.
    • A full 70 percent of participants reported that they felt that the app was easy and intuitive to install, and the remaining 30 percent reported that after this initial experience with the app, they would know exactly how to install it again in the future.
    • No one reported difficulty with installation or the need to have others help them install the app. Only one respondent said that they needed someone to show them how to use certain features of the app.
    • With respect to speed, 40 percent of participants found DApp much faster than most other apps they use and participants ran into no difficulties syncing the DApp with their other apps. Participants had between 10 and 260 different apps on their phones. No participants found the app slower than other apps.
  • Beta users generally felt that DApp comprehensively covered their healthcare-related needs currently.
    • When asked about what the DApp is missing, 50 percent responded “nothing,” and when asked what features participants would add, 30 percent said “none.”

Conclusion

From Patientory’s beta testing of its new beta and the subsequent user survey, it is evident that the DApp is meeting a clear and immediate need for the consumer market. Despite only being a beta product, the vast majority of users found the DApp to not only serve as a valuable healthcare solution but also function as an excellent tool for managing fitness and diet. Along with the value of the app, most individuals found the user experience to be very engaging and relevant, which is an indicator for repeated and ongoing use. Lastly, the back-end software of the app performed quite well according to a majority of users, with the speed of the app and ease and time of install getting high marks.

While these results reflect the feedback of a current beta product for Patientory and updates and enhancements will undoubtedly be made, the data shared in this report validates the value and need for Patientory’s DApp today. Nothing illustrates this idea more than a quote from a passionate beta user “I’m all in! I want to see this become a worldwide standard. Given our mobile society, this is key to saving lives.” We couldn’t agree more.

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Blockchain Healthcare Providers Patients

Blockchain: Reimagining the Future of Health Data

It’s time for us to reimagine the future of healthcare information technology. More specifically, it’s time for us to rethink the management of personal health information, i.e. data from electronic health records (EHRs) and wearable devices. Data will continue to drive the technology that is becoming increasingly intertwined in our everyday lives and this remains especially true for healthcare.

From internet-enabled medical devices to fitness trackers, developments in digital health are creating new opportunities for comprehensive patient care and raising new questions about the ethical management of healthcare data. At Patientory, we believe the correct application of blockchain technology will allow us to effectively take advantage of these opportunities and provide answers to some of these questions.

Challenges for Comprehensive Care

Despite the advent of EHRs, medical records still suffer from a lack of interoperability. IT systems are often siloed and unique to the provider, which means a large amount of time and resources are spent simply requesting, sending, and compiling health information. This makes it challenging to create a comprehensive picture of an individual’s health across multiple providers, especially when there are variations in insurance coverage and geographic location over time.

Additionally, we are starting to see an increase in clinicians relying on patient-generated health data in conjunction with clinical data. This type of information includes health histories, symptoms, lifestyle choices, biometrics, etc., and can better inform care decisions because it provides valuable insight into an individual’s overall health and well-being in between medical visits. While patient portals and EHRs allow for a small portion of this data to be compiled, today’s technologies could be leveraged more effectively to improve health outcomes.

Challenges for Healthcare Data Management

In addition to being siloed, legacy healthcare IT systems are often aging and lacking in robust cybersecurity measures. Hospitals are particularly appealing targets for cyberattacks because their daily operations rely heavily on up-to-date information from electronic medical records,  and stolen health information is worth ten times more than a credit card number on the black market. And the more an EHR is fragmented across multiple providers, the higher the patient’s risk of personal data being exposed to people with malicious intent.

Since all of a provider’s EHRs are stored in one place, a successful breach will give a hacker access to all of that information at once. What’s especially troubling about this is that individuals have little control over the storage of their own personal health data and can do little to prevent this. There is an overall lack of patient control when it comes to the access and use of their own medical data, and this reflects broader societal questions about data management. Legislation, including HIPAA, simply has not caught up to the growing role of data in our lives.

Blockchain as a Solution

When applied to EHRs, blockchain can potentially address these issues. A blockchain consists of encrypted blocks of data that are immutable and linked together chronologically in a chain. In a healthcare setting, these blocks of data could be doctor’s appointments, surgical procedures, x-ray images, prescriptions, blood test results, patient-generated health data, etc. Copies of the blockchain would be distributed across a specified network of users and any additions to the chain would be updated for all users in real-time. Individuals would be in charge of sharing the decryption key for their own associated blocks of data with their chosen healthcare provider(s).

With a distributed application like Patientory’s, individuals would have access to a comprehensive picture of their health that includes compiled data from EHRs and wearable devices. Breaking the silos of traditional medical record storage would not only make the process of sharing EHRs significantly easier, but also result in more robust security. By integrating with PTOYNet distributed and decentralized blockchain network our application is able to adhere to both HIPAA and robust security standards.

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Healthcare Providers Patients

The True Potential of Patient-Generated Health Data

There is no doubt that aggregated health data will continue to shape the future of healthcare. There are vast amounts of data available in today’s society, and health researchers are tapping into it to advance medical science. Large sets of data are regularly compiled and analyzed, and the findings are used to predict epidemics, cure diseases, provide better preventative care, and lower healthcare costs, among other positive things. The widespread adoption of electronic health records and the increasing prevalence of internet-enabled medical devices are creating even more opportunities for valuable data collection. While this unlocks very exciting possibilities for healthcare scientists and providers, where does the patient fit into all of this?

Patient-generated health data (PGHD) is defined by The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology as “health-related data created, recorded, or gathered by or from patients (or family members or other caregivers) to help address a health concern.” This includes health and treatment histories, symptoms, lifestyle choices, biometric data, etc. When used in conjunction with existing clinical data, PGHD can provide additional insight into an individual’s overall health and better inform decisions made by care providers. The use and sharing of PGHD can gather important information about an individual’s well-being between medical visits, allow for shared decision-making in preventive and chronic care management, and ultimately improve the cost, quality, and coordination of care.

Trust between patients and providers is a cornerstone of the medical profession and higher levels of trust result in improved health outcomes. In the Digital Health Technology Vision 2018, Accenture found that ninety-four percent of health executives believe that treating customers as partners is important or very important for gaining consumer trust. By its very nature, PGHD creates a valuable opportunity for an individual to become a true partner in their own care. Through the process of supplying data the provider would not have access to otherwise, the patient is given a voice and empowered to actively engage in their health. The power of this voice is further supported by today’s wellness apps, wearables, and fitness trackers, which are increasing consumer engagement with personal health data. However, as with any opportunity, there are potential challenges that need to be addressed.

First of all, electronic health records (EHRs) suffer from a lack of interoperability. The major benefit of PGHD is it can supplement the information found in EHRs to provide a more comprehensive picture of an individual’s health. This benefit cannot be fully realized if patient data is fragmented and siloed across multiple providers and IT systems. Another concern is data privacy and security. We are faced with the reality of hackers and data breaches almost daily, and consumers will be less willing to provide PGHD if they believe their personal information is at risk. Patientory’s distributed application uses blockchain technology to address these concerns and empowers individuals to compile and manage their own health information from multiple providers and wearable devices. They can then securely share their comprehensive health picture with the healthcare provider(s) of their choice, which allows all stakeholders to benefit from the use of PGHD. Learn more about our solution here.

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Patients

Returning the Control of Health Data to the Consumer

The vast amount of data available in today’s technology-driven and hyper-connected society is astounding. We create data everywhere we go with our smartphones, tablets, and laptops, and the increasing prevalence of the Internet of Things means that even more of the devices we interact with on a daily basis are gathering and sharing information. The application of this information through the creation and interpretation of large data sets, i.e. big data, is becoming an increasingly valuable economic force. Organizations in both the public and the private sectors are leveraging big data across industries, including healthcare, to develop more effective practices, inspire innovative breakthroughs, and better serve consumer needs.

The growing role of data in our lives and the data trading markets that have arisen raise important questions about data access and ownership. Who rightfully owns data, the individual creating it or the organization collecting it? Who has the right to access all of this information and what are they allowed to do with it? Who ultimately has more control when it comes to data use, the individual or the organization? Unfortunately, there is not a clear answer to these questions because in many cases our laws simply have not caught up yet. When it comes to electronic health records in the United States, providers are technically the owners (in every state except New Hampshire) since the data is recorded and stored on their IT systems.

One example of new data-related legislation, which came into effect just this year, is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), enacted by the European Union. The goal of the law is to ensure better data protection and privacy for all individuals by enhancing their rights when it comes to the handling of their personal information. The new rules require organizations to ensure that consumers explicitly consent to data collection and clearly understand the type of information being collected. Individuals in the EU now have the right to access their personal data, to request corrections to inaccurate data, and to restrict the use of their data. Although the full impact of the GDPR remains to be seen, it is a step in the right direction towards consumer empowerment when it comes to data.

There is no doubt that big data will continue to shape the future of healthcare. It is being used to predict epidemics, cure diseases, provide better preventative care, and lower costs, among other positive things. However, individuals have a surprising lack of control when it comes to their own health information. They are often asked to sign away health data ownership via blanket consent forms at times when they are scared or vulnerable, such as before surgery. Consumer rights need to be evolving alongside the use of data in healthcare. Patientory believes individuals should be able to easily access their own comprehensive health data and manage the use of it on their own terms. This is why we developed our distributed application. You can learn more about our solution to healthcare data access and control here.

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Blockchain Patients

The Dark Side of Medical Data Trading

Longitudinal data, i.e. data collected from an individual at multiple points in time, can be very useful to medical researchers and provide valuable insights into health and illness. A famous example is the Framingham Heart Study, which was initiated in 1948 and continues on today. Researchers have followed three generations of participants, collecting and analyzing data to successfully identify the common characteristics and risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease. This type of health data use is common in clinical research and epidemiology, where aggregated data can reveal important information that leads to improved patient care and public health practices. However, health researchers motivated by advancing medical science are not the only ones interested in longitudinal data collection. Commercial companies motivated by profit are interested too.

There is a multi-billion dollar industry that exists around the buying and selling of medical data. Despite the fact that this is a common practice, many people are unaware of it. Data brokers pool data from hundreds of millions of pharmacy prescriptions, medical records, insurance claims, etc., and then slice and dice the information to sell to interested parties. This is technically allowed under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) because the data is intended to be anonymous. The medical information is not tied directly to a name, social security number, or detailed address. However, data brokers still add unique numbers to the data they collect, which allows them to build detailed patient dossiers by linking different pieces of information to the same individual. And with today’s advances in data mining technology and the vast amount of data available, the re-identification of anonymized data has only gotten easier.

Overall consumers have a troubling lack of control when it comes to their own medical data. We’d like to think the information we share with our healthcare providers remains private but this is not the case. In fact, the legal right of commercial companies to collect and sell health information without the explicit permission of the patient has been upheld by the Supreme Court. In the 1990s, the dominant player in the medical data trading industry began selling data to pharmaceutical companies on what individual physicians were prescribing to patients. These drug companies would then use the information to better tailor and target marketing and sales efforts. Once people caught on and started to complain about the invasion of privacy for profit, a few states passed legislation to limit the trade of prescriber-identifiable information. The major data broker then took them to court and won on corporate “free speech” grounds.

So why are the rights of data brokers to sell data privileged over the rights of patients to manage their own health information? Patientory does not have an answer to this question but we do believe in the power of blockchain to shift this paradigm. Distributed ledger technology has the ability to democratize data access by securing and validating data through a network rather than a single database. In addition to addressing cybersecurity and interoperability issues, blockchain technology can place the control of medical data sharing into the hands of individual patients through an app like Patientory’s. We believe consumers have a right to access their own health information and limit or permit the use of it as they see fit.