Digital Currencies and Blockchain in the Medical Arena
Recently, digital currencies, such as bitcoin, have greatly increased in popularity. Some of this popularity may be attributed to digital currencies’ many purported advantages over traditional currencies, such as that blockchain technology allows for a distributed and cryptographically secure ledger without the use of traditional banking institutions. Newer and more advanced digital currencies have recently been introduced with the added advantage of smart contracts, which are said to be self-executing contractual clauses that may be programmed into a digital currency transaction. As such, many new digital currencies have been appearing with individuals investing in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), which are somewhat akin to the Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) of a traditional corporation.
Even more recently, a few companies have begun to make use of digital currencies and blockchain technology in the medical arena. Many have found blockchain technology uniquely suited to secure patient records, and have found that the smart contracts of digital currencies may allow individuals greater control of their medical data. Below is a summary of a few fields of medicine and companies within those fields in which digital currencies and blockchain are already being developed.
Medical Records and Health Data
According to The Merkle, Bowhead Health is the first medical device company using their AHT digital currency tokens with smart contracts to create a new medical data market. The company plans to allow individuals with Bowhead’s digital currency to control the dissemination of their medical data, and also to compensate those individuals if and when they choose to share with research institutions. Bowhead’s AHT tokens are said to allow 70% of research fees to be distributed to users with the other 30% going to token holders.
According to Blockchain News, Medicalchain is a UK-based company using blockchain technology to allow patients to securely store and send their medical records to their healthcare professionals. Medicalchain is said to allow patients to have a centralized medical record accessible from anywhere in the world, and allow individuals the ability to control medical institutions’ access to their records.
The Medical Society of Delaware has partnered with the company Medscient, and they are using blockchain technology to create a proof-of-concept platform to allow insurers and medical care providers to access patient records, according to The Cointelegraph. The article further states that this partnership was made possible when the state of Delaware became the first state to pass a law allowing the use of blockchain technology in business for stock trading and record-keeping.
Medical Licenses
The Illinois Blockchain Initiative has partnered with Hashed Health to create a pilot program to streamline the process of issuing and tracking medical licenses, according to The Cointelegraph. The goal of this partnership is said to give patients and healthcare providers a transparent license registry system that uses smart contracts to automatically update information.
Medicine and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
According to news sources, Doc.ai is a collaboration between developers from the universities of Stanford and Cambridge, and is said to be creating a platform built on blockchain technology and using AI to create a resource to answer patient’s specific questions regarding their personal health records and their physician’s analysis.
Respironics Files for Inter Partes Review of ZOLL Medical’s Patient Monitoring Patent
Respironics, Inc., a subsidiary of Koninklijke Philips N.V., filed a petition last Friday with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board requesting inter partes review of ZOLL Medical Corporation’s U.S. Patent No. 6,681,003 to Linder et. al. The petition identifies Koninklijke Philips as a real party-in-interest.
The ‘003 patent is entitled “Data Collection and System Management for Patient-Word Medical Devices.” The ‘003 patent relates to “a method and system of monitoring information received from a patient-word medical device.”
The petition seeks review of nine of the patent’s 35 issued claims. Eight of these nine claims identified in the petition have been asserted by ZOLL Medical against Respironics in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of Delaware. The amended complaint, filed on January 9, 2013, alleges that Respironics’s “patient medical monitoring and treatment systems and methods” including positive airway pressure devices, infringe the ‘003 patent.
Share