Great article:
Iryo delivering better health outcomes
There’s an important reason the Presidents of the United States travel with their personal physician. In the event of a health emergency, there is a doctor at their side with knowledge and access to the President’s entire health history and who can ensure the best delivery of medical services. But, what about the rest of us without the luxury of having a doctor on our payroll?
In the event of a health emergency, the portability and interoperability of our medical history and records will greatly impact the health outcome. I recently experienced how the lack of portable and interoperable medical records in an emergency situation endangered the health of my child. In describing the experience, I will be intentionally vague on some details in order to protect the privacy of my child.
On a Thursday morning, my child was experiencing severe pain. We immediately went to the pediatrician’s office. An MRI scan was performed. The pediatrician was unsure how to treat the situation and instructed us to come back if the condition got worse. The condition did get worse on Saturday night. As the pediatrician’s office was closed, we went to the hospital emergency room. Neither the hospital nor I had access to medical records generated at the pediatrician’s office a couple days ago, so another MRI was ordered and evaluated as well as other tests. The team of doctors at the hospital recommended immediate surgery but wanted to get the opinion of a specialist before proceeding.
However, another complication arose. It’s late Saturday night and there isn’t a doctor in my region with the needed speciality. Even if a specialist was found, it was unknown how the hospital would be able to immediately transmit my child’s medical records to the specialist with full data integrity and security. Fortunately, the hospital staff found a specialist still awake in a city 130 miles away and figured out a way to transmit the medical records.
Thankfully, once the specialist saw the MRI scan, he saw that my child had been misdiagnosed and didn’t need surgery. Instead, my child fully recovered from the condition about a week later. Despite this fantastic outcome, I was shocked how the inability to access and share medical records posed a significant health risk to my family and almost caused my child to have an unnecessary surgery.
To address this issue, Iryo is building the tools that create unified health records of globally interoperable medical data with openEHR archetypes that empowers patients to take their medical histories with them. Unified health records, solidified by the adoption of blockchain enable patients to have secure access and allows them to selectively share their medical history with any medical professional, anywhere in the world.
In the case of my child, with the adoption of the Iryo network, I could have possessed the MRI scan and other medical records generated at the pediatrician’s office. I could then have instantly shared that medical data with the hospital emergency room doctors and the specialist and arrived at a quick and accurate diagnosis. With Iryo, we could have avoided 5+ hours in the emergency room, wasted MRI and other medical tests, and wasted hours of several medical professionals’ time.
Iryo will not only aid in better health outcomes, it will also make healthcare delivery more efficient and reduce waste.
https://medium.com/iryo-network/iryo-delivering-better-health-outcomes-d5aeb55cab63
