Open Health launches blockchain functionality to encourage patient data sharing

Dive Brief:

• The Open Health Network in Mountain View, Calif., Has launched a new platform feature that allows users to earn money or prizes for uploading personal health data.
• The new feature, called PatientSphere, uses artificial intelligence and blockchain technology to link researchers and health care providers to those who seek clinical trial or analysis and monetize the data provided.
• Patients can also share their data – which can be uploaded from a variety of sources, including wearables, EHR and Google Fit – with their personal physicians and insurance company.

Dive Insight:

The first level of the program allows people to compile their health data in one location and decide who has access and when and where information can be viewed. The intermediate layer is actually made up of two levels: a HIPAA-compliant database where data is stored and the identity management of patients powered by blockchain. Finally, there is a HIPAA-compliant metadata layer for finding potential test participants and publishing identified information.

The new blockchain enabled feature could help users push for interoperability and attract more patients to their data.

Blockchain is seeing more use in health care. Suppliers, payers, companies and medical researchers all see the potential for technology to solve problems ranging from interoperability to supply chain problems and inducing people to adopt healthy behaviors.

But the numbers are fundamental. The more people enter a blockchain network, the more robust the whole blockchain becomes. One of the biggest challenges for blockchain in the health sector is to convince people to get on the network because incentives are not always aligned among the different groups of potential participants.

"What blockchain has been able to do is create markets where there was no market before," said Noah Zimmerman, director of the Blockchain biochemical research center at Mount Sinai, at the start of this year. . "The question is: are there ways to exploit the same kind of behavior: involve and incentivize people to achieve an important goal, and do it in the health space?"

Other companies are trying to create data markets in the healthcare sector. Mumbai-based LTI, based in India, is working with a large European insurance company for a wellness program that uses blockchain to track healthy behavior at the corporate and individual level and rewards participants with discounted rates.

Embleema has developed a patient-driven blockchain network that allows patients to securely share their medical records and personal health information and to establish limits to who can access data.