HDCH – Building the future of healthcare

[hdch_io]

HDCH is a  blockchain technology based ecosystem for health care industry. As blockchain brought about powerful solutions for many technical and social problems, we believe that it’s perfectly fit for the health care industry. It not only provides a new information management solution for the health care industry, but also brings in new mechanisms to solve the long standing problems in the health care industry.

As we know, the business models in health care industry are very complicated. There are many entities involved in this market, including patients or customers, service providers or organizations, government agencies etc. The relationships between them are very complex. Because of these, there are many long standing problems in the health care industry, such as rising costs, information islanding, scarcity of medical resources, etc.

The complexity of these problems generally comes from the externality of the market, which happens when the decisions and behaviors of the participants of the market lead to costs or benefits of others who are not involved in this market. For example, a man with infectious disease may influence the health condition of people around him, so if he tried his best to cure himself, people around him would be benefited, otherwise, they might suffer. Because of the externality, many government agencies and third-party organizations are introduced into this market, aiming to represent the benefits of external people. This makes the health care market a semi-free market, and the decisions and behaviors of entities in this market are entangled with each other. 

However, the externality isn’t effectively removed by the introduction of government agencies and third-party organizations. There are still a lot of behaviors of externality in this market. For example, people lack incentives to pay for fitness services, although it’s good for their long-term health so it can reduce medical care burdens of the whole society; Some doctors provide over treatments to their patients, which add to the medical care burdens of the whole society.

The development of blockchain technology provides us a new tool to solve the externality problems of the health care industry. In fact, blockchain technology builds consensus by incentivizing nodes in the network to honestly package the transaction records generated in the network, so removes the role of central organization. This consensus scheme can also be used to incentivize people to make their decisions considering the total benefits of the whole society but not only his current personal benefit. Generally speaking, people can get cryptocurrency rewards when they make efforts to contribute to their own health and thus the total society’s welfare. By providing such an incentive, we could make the market work properly considering its external influences.

For short, we build an ecosystem on blockchain technology which can bring about following changes to the health care industry:

People will be incentivized to pay more attention about their own health conditions,  which would reduce the burdens of the medical expenditure of the whole society, improve the adherence of the patients to the treatments, lower the number of claims of insurance companies. At the same time, this provides good opportunities to many innovative companies, such as companies provide fitness  services and intelligent healthcare devices. In a word, this is a win-win solution to all parties in the health care industry.
The transaction processes between entities would be automated and accelerated, and the cost during these processes would be greatly reduced. Meanwhile, the security would be enhanced.
The information generated during service processes, including the medical records and transaction records would be securely stored and easily shared to entities who are authorized. This greatly improve the interoperability of the entities in the health care industry. Patients could hold their health data and profit from sharing data to research organizations, and organizations could get data they wanted easily from patients all around the world.
There would be more innovative businesses built based on the new ecosystem, breaking the territory restrictions and information barriers.

[luke07758]

I think you've got a great idea, but in practice I'm not sure how it will play out. Reduced healthcare costs is something I think everyone wants but the problem is (at least in the US – I have no idea how healthcare works elsewhere) the insurance companies and doctors are making so much money from these inflated costs that they likely would not seek a better alternative. If healthcare costs are reduced, insurance companies would make less money, so already you've got some very large companies that would be against this idea. How do you plan on effectively marketing your idea and getting companies to use this instead of the insurance payment model which has been in place for so long?