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Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), one of the top five hospitals in the US, is partnering with the Korean blockchain startup MediBloc in an effort to find better ways to store and share patient data.
Synho Do, director of the Laboratory of Medical Imaging and Computation, a joint venture of MGH and Harvard Medical School, told CoinDesk that the hospital is expanding a range of areas from medical image analysis to health information exchange edge technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and machine learning. "
Regarding this specific partnership, Do added:
"In collaboration with Medibloc, we aim to explore the potentials of blockchain technology to provide secure solutions for health information exchange, integrated healthcare applications into the day-to-day clinical workflow, and support [a] data sharing and labeling platform for machine learning model development. "
Multiple cases – hospitals, research bodies, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies But currently, they're all keeping their own data that can not be shared securely and often is in various incompatible formats.
"Allen Wookyun Kho, MediBloc's founder and CEO, told CoinDesk" Every day, when it comes to hospitals.
He added that it is not only developing a distributed ledger for storing and sharing medical data, but also working on a tool that would be converted into a universal one.
A range of blockchain startups have been working on enabling fast and secure transmission of healthcare data. But partnerships with actual major medical institutions such as MGH – which U.S. News and World Report ranked No.4 in the country in its most recent annual surveys – rare.
Kamal Khan, CEO of blockchain startups Translo, who is also a member of the company Labs.
The vendors, in the turn, are the reasons for this kind of information, which is why hospitals have different healthcare systems and different systems for different kind of diseases.
Khan told CoinDesk:
"Even in Boston, there are 27 different systems for only 17 hospitals, and they lack interoperability. This is done on purpose: the date is out of the siloed system, the hospital can create their own system. "
This is the reason why the new system will be provided for the new system.
Partners across Asia
MediBloc, however, has had notable success in getting partners, at least in Asia; according to Kho, now eight medical institutions across the region and 14 tech companies, including Deloitte Anjin LLC, Deloitte's Korean branch, have signed up to test MediBloc's system.
Dawn Lee, the startup's business development manager, told that CoinDesk has been in Korea for the first time in Korea, in December 2017.
This, and the fact that MediBloc's founders, Kho and Eunsol Lee, are doctors, helped to develop relationships with government officials and actual hospitals.
As a result, he was selected as a provider of blockchain technology for two government-funded projects, with the Bundang Seoul National University and Seoul St. Mary's Hospital, Lee said.
That record of working with big medical institutions led the Laboratory of Medical Imaging and Computation to approach MediBloc, she said. "The MGH Lab came from our company, we started talking in the early spring, signed a deal in the summer and we just started the research."
MediBloc's main focus is on an ecosystem on which other startups can build their apps for various ways to use and exchange health data.
Kho said, he is expected to be in the middle of the year and become fully functional in the second quarter of 2019. MediBloc 's public blockchain will use the delegated proof of the consensus method and is currently relying on 10 nodes – on the mainnet, the number will be 21, Kho said.
There are also apps in the works by MediBloc to be live in the first half of 2019. One of them, currently in beta testing phase with 300 users, is designed for patients to MediBloc. After that, MediBloc will analyze the data and sell the analysis to the pharmaceutical and insurance companies.
In the future, users will be able to sell or share their data directly to the buyers, without MediBloc as an intermediary, Kho told CoinDesk.
The main goal is to decide what to do with their information.
"We make patients the mediums of their own data," Lee concluded.
Massachusetts General Hospital image via Shutterstock
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