When the patient goes home, does Blockchain follow them?
Blockchain products in healthcare have proven to have the potential of making interoperability practical and achievable. This innovativeness has been pushed a step further with blockchain products (although few) that are helping to make follow-ups on patient performance, satisfaction, medication, and recovery. Isn’t this amazing?
ConnectingCare
CEO and founder of the California-based company, Katherine Kuzmeskas, has stated in no uncertain terms that they aim at “tackling the inefficiencies around value-based care,” with a keen focus on, “reimbursement for quantity to reimbursement for quality.”
The company which started in 2017, offers a blockchain product called ConnectingCare. Its primary role is to help follow-up on patients and also bring down the cost and time taken offering post-treatment care. ConncectingCare is also pushing health care providers to co-operate even more as a way of tracking patient performance.
One particular attribute is that ConnectingCare is the reward system where providers are rewarded (through incentives and compensation) depending on how healthy they keep their patients.
Lucas Hendren summed up the platform’s role even more precisely saying, “It uses care coordination and financial forecasting to help providers in bundled payments get insight into what happens to patients when they leave the hospital.”
PointNurse
Using blockchain technology, PointNurse aims at “delivering primary care and care management to targeted populations. PointNurse is a revolutionary platform that gives patient management a different approach. Patients can access services such as care consultancy, health assessment, behavior management programs and care co-ordination. The platform utilises a cryptocurrency known as NurseCoin.
The focus on caregiving through NurseCoin no doubt disrupts the healthcare sector in a major way, as the platform promises to “close gaps in care, reward patient behavior and provider performance, and create unprecedented healthcare delivery efficiency.”
PointNurse is unique in that only licensed, enlisted professionals are allowed to engage patients.
The platform is a blockchain-based digital community enabling licensed professionals to engage in secure and private conversations with patients in remote locations.
Dentacoin
Dentacoin is a blockchain platform in the healthcare sector. Its focus is the dental industry enabling patients and dentists to linkup for treatment and also share information to enhance dental care. Over the last one year, the project has aimed to make significant progress with the development of its first tools: Dentacoin Trusted Reviews – website for detailed and incentivised feedback on dental services; DentaVox – survey webapp, gathering users’ opinion on dental health topics; Dentacare – mobile app which helps people establish oral hygiene habits.
The platform utilises Dentacoin (DCN) for transactions between all network participants. It is said to be rapidly gaining in value and popularity, more so because 21 clinics in different parts of the world accept payment in DCN. Dentacoin removes one of the industry’s main headache, middlemen (including big insurance companies), and instead empowers patients and dentists to actively and consistently interact with each other, thus reducing the cost of treatment by a huge margin.
DCN has an elaborate roadmap for development through which short term and long-term milestones are outlined. Among the unique accomplishments made by Dentacoin is the acquisition of the Dentaprime International Plc in London valued at US$90 million (€75.03 million). The payment was entirely settled on DCN.
The future is here
Blockchain developers are almost never sleeping as evidenced by the numerous products being rolled out all the time. The healthcare sector is no doubt a big beneficiary of the competitiveness witnessed as more products come into the market. Nonetheless, patients and healthcare practitioners will have to choose their investments wisely and more carefully, given the sensitivity of health data. The future is, however, more promising with products such as Dentacoin.
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