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Special Thanks to The Office of Economic Development Düsseldorf for the invitation to exhibit at MEDICA – Leading International Trade Fair and for organizing the glorious networking event with local authorities of commerce and healthcare in Germany.

Germany, like many countries in Europe, is undergoing a healthcare technology maturation. In late 2019 the German  parliament passed the Digital Healthcare Act (Digitale-Versorgung-Gesetz-DVG).  This act aims to bring their health systems to compete with the changing digital technology landscape and increase the number of digital therapeutics, or Digital health applications (DiGA). 86% of the apps that have been submitted for approval have been made in Germany with 4% in the US and New Zealand. It’s estimated the German government could save as much as 9.6 billion euros on the digitization of their health data.

One of the most important aspects of the DVG is the “prescribable applications” designation.  Apps, software, and other digital health measures can be put through a fast-track review process and if they are approved can be added to a list where they can be prescribed by doctors and therapists.  If there is not any available evidence, the app can be put on a yearlong trial.  After twelve months in the trial system, they can be added to the permanent list if those positive effects have been shown.  More importantly, any costs run up by those digital health measures can be covered in part or in full by Germany’s national health system.  There is currently legislation in place to develop a parallel system of nursing apps that will support those taking care of the elderly at home.

The advantages of DVG legislation for both the app builders and the app users is clear.  Developers can more easily find new clients and thus grow their business; clients/users don’t have to worry about paying for any costs that result from using it.  Health care providers and other health care industry workers have a wealth of data at their hands they can use to track various drugs, treatments, and health-related data.  The evaluation process itself provides another benefit for data collection: since the app has already had to pass certain standards of effectiveness, there is a baseline level of evidence the data from the app has had to meet.  Currently, 24 apps have been judged to meet the standard.  An estimated 50 thousand prescriptions for those apps have been made since November 2021.

Until 2021, health data in Germany did not have to be digital.  New legislation passed in 2021 year mandates that all health records be made available digitally. Hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies will also be required to connect to a nationally available digital infrastructure.  They will also be given a greater percentage of funds if prescriptions are given as e-prescriptions rather than paper ones.

By 2025 the digital health market in Germany is estimated to have grown to 57 Billion Euros.  Please watch our Founder & CEO, Chrissa McFarlane interview at Medica 2021 event. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6wumd39Mac

Titan CEO and headline sponsor Wipfli LLP are pleased to announce Chrissa McFarlane, Founder & CEO of Patientory Inc as a 2022 Georgia Titan 100. The Titan 100 program recognizes Georgia’s Top 100 CEO’s and C-level executives. They are the area’s most accomplished business leaders in their industry using criteria that include demonstrating exceptional leadership, vision, and passion.

Collectively the 2022 Georgia Titan 100 and their companies employ upwards of 240,000 individuals and generate over $66 billion dollars in annual revenues. This year’s honorees will be published in a limited-edition Titan 100 book and profiled exclusively online. They will be honored at an awards ceremony on May 12th , 2022, and will be given the opportunity to interact and connect multiple times throughout the year with their fellow Titans.

“The Titan 100 are shaping the future of the Georgia business community by building a distinguished reputation that is unrivaled and preeminent in their field. We proudly recognize the Titan 100 for their successes and contributions. We know that they will have a profound impact that makes an extraordinary difference for their customers and clients across the nation.” says Jaime Zawmon, President of Titan CEO.

Chrissa McFarlane founded Patientory after working more than a decade in the healthcare technology industry and realizing there was a need for more personalized, secure and consumer-driven health information management solutions.

Chrissa McFarlane says “I believe innovative technology can help resolve the three primary problems with today’s healthcare system: poor quality, limited access, and high cost. I hope to spend my career creating and deploying innovative technologies that enable every person around the world to access high-quality healthcare at sustainable costs. I love working in closely-knit teams to develop and scale new products and grow new businesses.”

Chrissa McFarlane will be honored at the Titan 100 awards on May 12 th , 2022, at Zoo Atlanta: Savanna Hall. One of the city’s most treasured historic buildings the 1921 building has been revitalized by Zoo Atlanta for its new life today. As home of the Atlanta Cyclorama for more than 90 years, the building is famous for its grand scale and neoclassical architecture. This unique cocktail-style awards event will gather 100 Titans of Industry and their guests for an evening unlike anything that exists in the Georgia business community.

“On behalf of all the partners and associates at Wipfli we congratulate all the Titan100 winners. It’s an honor to recognize this diverse group of leaders in the Atlanta community. We appreciate the lasting impact each leader has made, and continues to make, in building organizations of significance both in Atlanta and abroad. Your ingenuity and creativity have set you apart, and the honor of being seen as an industry Titan is richly deserved,” says Bill Boucher, Partner at Wipfli.

This white paper is intended to provide different insights for governments, businesses, academics, and civil society actors. For public sector employees and elected officials – from mayors and ministers to data scientists and service developers – it offers ideas, insights, suggestions, and recommendations for the further development and practical deployment of human-centric data policy. It also offers valuable considerations for business, research, and civil society organizations that work closely with the public sector.

Our company is a proud collaborator and reviewer of this whitepaper focusing on how data can empower the healthcare sector. 
For more information, please read the complete whitepaper here at https://bit.ly/3sND9Ll

About World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.

The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.

It was established in 1971 as a not-for-profit foundation and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It is independent, impartial and not tied to any special interests. The Forum strives in all its efforts to demonstrate entrepreneurship in the global public interest while upholding the highest standards of governance. Moral and intellectual integrity is at the heart of everything it does.

Awards highlight dedication and innovation within medical device and diagnostics.

Philadelphia – September 23, 2018 – Today, winners of the 2018 Medtech Insight Awards were announced at a gala ceremony held at the Kimpton Hotel Monaco. The inaugural event was attended by industry thought leaders and innovators who gathered to celebrate excellence among companies, teams, and individuals driving positive change across the medtech industry.

The Medtech Insight Awards were established to honor those, who through their passion and dedication, are driven to cure, inform, minimize treatment burden and make human lives better through medical devices and diagnostics.

Categories recognize achievements across the medtech industry, from technological innovations and partnerships, to emerging markets and fast-growing companies, to standout entrepreneurs.

“Pharma Intelligence congratulates the winners of the inaugural Medtech Insight Awards,” said David Filmore, Editor-in-Chief of Medtech Insight. “The winners epitomize the dedication and innovation that medical device and diagnostics developers have demonstrated over the past year.”

Below is a complete list of the 2018 Medtech Insight Awards winners:

Best Company for Accelerated Growth: Eargo

Best Proof-of-Value of an Innovation: Immunexpress: SeptiCyte™

Best Technological Innovation, Consumer Devices: Eargo Max – Air Conduction Hearing Aid

Best Technological Innovation, Diagnostics: Agendia – MammaPrint BluePrint Breast Cancer Recurrence and Molecular Subtyping Kit

Best Technological Innovation, Therapeutic Devices: Axonics Modulation Technologies – Sacral Neuromodulation System

Entrepreneur of the Year: Chrissa McFarlane, Patientory

Most Innovative Clinical Trial: Intersect ENT – The RESOLVE II Study

Most Innovative Team or Innovator of the Year: DNAe

The In Vivo Award for Best Medtech Partnership/Alliance: WuXi AppTec Group and Mayo Clinic

Venture Financial Deal of the Year: CMR Surgical – $100m Series B Funding

Highly Commended:

Best Proof-of-Value of an Innovation: Cardiva Medical – VASCADE

Best Technological Innovation – Diagnostics: Qgel

Most Innovative Team or Innovator of the Year: electroCore

Winners were chosen from entries adjudicated by an esteemed judging panel, which included: Serge Bernasconi, Chief Executive Officer, MedTech Europe; Bill Murray, Specialist Leader, Deloitte Consulting; Fredrik Nyberg, Chief Executive Officer, Asia Pacific Medical Technology Association (APACMed); Richard Phillips, Director, Healthcare Policy, ABHI; Randel Richner, Founder, President, Richner Consultants; Leslie Saxon, Professor of Medicine, Keck School of Medicine of USC; Kristin Simeons, Vice President of Business Development, ximedica; Mark Turco, Chief Innovation Officer & Corporate Outreach Officer, Penn Center for Innovation.

The Medtech Insight Awards are managed by Medtech Insight, the trusted experts of the global medical technology industry. Medtech Insight provides real-time news and analysis, regulatory and company development news, and analyst perspective to help medical device and diagnostics professionals gain competitive advantage.

About Informa Pharma Intelligence
Informa Pharma Intelligence powers a full suite of analysis products – Datamonitor Healthcare, Sitetrove, Trialtrove, Pharmaprojects, Medtrack, Biomedtracker, Medtech Insight Scrip, Pink Sheet and In Vivo – to deliver the data needed by the pharmaceutical and biomedical industry to make decisions and create real-world opportunities for growth.

With more than 500 analysts keeping their fingers on the pulse of the industry, no key disease, clinical trial, drug approval or R&D project isn’t covered through the breadth and depth of data available to customers. For more information visit pharmaintelligence.informa.com.

About Informa PLC
Informa operates at the heart of the Knowledge and Information Economy. It is one of the world’s leading business intelligence, academic publishing, knowledge and events businesses. With more than 6,500 employees globally, it has a presence in all major geographies, including North America, South America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

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