Five Healthcare Projects Powered by Hyperledger You May Not Know About

The New Year brings about various resolutions for millions across the globe. For many, that means putting more focus on their physical and mental health. Blockchain’s ability to revolutionize healthcare is undeniable. When applied to healthcare, blockchain is a shared platform that decentralizes health data without compromising the security of sensitive information. For example, patients can potentially use their own signatures, combined with a hospital signature, to unlock data to provide secure access to medical information for use in treatment. Patients could have full control of their medical information, selecting the information they want shared and viewed by providers or doctors. This model lifts the costly burden of maintaining patient’s medical histories away from hospitals. Also, counterfeit medicine is a big issue pharma companies face in their everyday operations since there are many stakeholders involved in the supply chain. Recall of drugs and avoiding counterfeit drugs from entering into legit marketplaces will help in reducing the losses and improving service delivery to the end customer. Blockchain could be used to maintain the entire supply chain in healthcare.

Below is a list of some interesting healthcare applications powered by Hyperledger technology you may or may not have known about:

Axuall – Axuall is a digital network for verifying identity, credentials, and authenticity in real-time using the Sorvin Network and Hyperledger Indy. The Axuall network is currently in pilot with Hyr Medical and their 650+ physician network in addition to two other health systems. Physicians’ time is better spent practicing medicine than filling out redundant, repetitive credentialing paperwork consisting of unchanging information. Using Axuall’s digital credentialing network, physicians will be able to present fully compliant credential sets to participating healthcare systems and medical groups they are affiliated with or applying to. Utilizing the cryptographic constructs from Hyperledger Indy, healthcare organizations will be able to verify the validity of a physician’s credentials – spanning medical education, training, licensing, board certification, work history, competency evaluations, sanctions, and adverse events – ensuring compliance with industry standards, regulatory mandates, and health system bylaws. 

KitChain – LedgerDomain joined forces with other industry leaders like Pfizer, IQVIA, UPS, Merck, UCLA Health, GSK, Thermo Fisher, and Biogen to build out a pilot on Hyperledger Fabric called KitChain. Scoped and developed over the course of two years, KitChain aims to demonstrate a robust collaborative model for managing the pharmaceutical clinical supply chain, creating an immutable record for shipment and event tracking without the need to resort to paperwork and manual transcription. KitChain has two major components: a frontend mobile application and a backend blockchain server. The backend was implemented in Golang and used Hyperledger Fabric, the LedgerDomain Selvedge blockchain app platform, and LedgerDomain’s DocuSeal framework, encompassing smart contracts and application logic. As such, the pilot has a fully functioning highly secure blockchain backend.

MELLODDY Project – This drug discovery project uses Amazon Web Services technologies to execute Machine Learning algorithms from academic partners on a large scale. The data never leaves the owner’s infrastructure and only non-sensitive models are exchanged. A central dispatcher allows each partner to share a common model to be consolidated collectively. To provide full traceability of the operations, the platform is based on a private blockchain and uses Substra, a software framework for orchestrating distributed machine learning tasks in a secure way. Substra is based on Hyperledger Fabric. MELLODDY is designed to prevent the leaking of proprietary information from one data set to another or through one model to another while at the same time boosting the predictive performance and applicability domain of the models by leveraging all available data. The MELLODDY consortium consists of 17 partners: 

• 10 pharmaceutical companies: Amgen, Astellas, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, GSK, Janssen Pharmaceutica NV, Merck KgaA, Novartis, and Institut de Recherches Servier 
• Two academic universities: KU Leuven, Budapesti Muszaki es Gazdasagtudomanyi Egyetem
• Four subject matter experts: Owkin, Substra Foundation, Loodse, Iktos
• One large AI computing company: NVIDIA

MyClinic.com – Medicalchain was one of the first healthcare blockchain companies to join the Hyperledger community, signing on as a member in 2017. The company’s ethos is to empower patients to have access to their medical records. Providing patients with direct access to their data unlocks the barriers we face in healthcare today such as patient choice and interoperability issues. A doctor-led team based in the UK, Medicalchain trialled the first telemedicine consultation using blockchain technology.  The company’s first blockchain-based product to market, MyClinic.com, makes it easy to schedule appointments, review medical reports and request further investigations or assistance using an Android and iOS app. Now the company is set to focus on scalability with the view to onboarding clinics and patients locally, nationally and internationally.

Verified.Me – SecureKey launched its innovative and in-demand network to Canadian consumers in early 2019. Verified.Me is a blockchain-based digital identity network built upon Hyperledger Fabric 1.2 that enables consumers to stay in control of their information by choosing when to share information and with whom, reducing unnecessary oversharing of personal information. Sun Life Financial has signed on as an early adopter and the first North American (health) insurer, making it easier for their clients to do business with the company.  Dynacare, one of Canada’s largest and most respected providers of health and wellness solutions, has joined the Verified.Me network. Dynacare’s participation will make it easier for Canadians to verify their identities as well as gain safer and faster access to their health information.

Curious about blockchain and advances in healthcare? Contribute to the conversation by joining the Hyperledger Healthcare Special Interest Group (HC-SIG). Open to anyone, the SIG was created to offer healthcare professionals and technologists a forum to discuss the implementation of technology solutions using blockchain technologies in general like Hyperledger frameworks and toolsets in specific.

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