Authors: John Bass, Corey Todaro
Editors: Vikram Dhillon, David Metcalf
John Bass is the founder and CEO of Hashed Health, a blockchain-based health IT consortium with the members working to commercialize appropriate use cases in health care and deliver proof-of-concept that can be scaled. In this Appendix, we reproduce a long-form Interview with John Bass about topics such as these:
• His background and previous work in health care.
• The makings of Hashed Health.
• Collaborative and consortium models.
• Working groups for high-risk, high-reward model.
• Governance in Hashed Health.
• Member participation.
■ Note John Bass contributed to this interview and chapter in his personal capacity. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of other authors, employers or any affiliated institutional entities.
Vikram Dhillon: So John, can you tell our readers about your background, and what made you interested in building health care startups?
John Bass: Many of us in the health care technology industry have spent our professional lives working to build applications and intelligence that helps stakeholders (providers, vendors, payers, consumers, etc.) understand the opportunities to improve care delivery and curb costs. As a community, we have a hope that we can change the system; that we can make an unfair system fair again; that, using technology, we can go back to a place where health care is centered on the individual consumer patient rather than the corporate interest. We all dream of the ever-elusive health care platform that captures the hearts and minds of patients, builds the network effects, and makes everything better. We dream of saving our country from runaway health costs, a national security issue of our own making. We dream about delivering care to the millions of people who struggle with access. We dream of creating something so viral that it scales globally and helps millions of people around the world get the care they need. We want it so bad we lose sleep. We want it so bad we abandon our families for weeks at a time, hoping to light the fuse.
© Vikram Dhillon, David Metcalf, and Max Hooper 2017
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Vikram: What got you started thinking about building a blockchain-based health care company?
John: The startups I have been a part of have all focused on Web-based products that promoted collaboration, data sharing, shared workflows, and cross-enterprise clinical or financial performance. Our teams have built B2B platforms, patient portals, collaborative workflow solutions, surgical performance solutions, and other trendy IT solutions that I thought would change the industry. These efforts, like most of the solutions you see at the big health care technology trade shows, focus on adding applications on top of the existing infrastructure. They essentially support the existing health care value chains, with the goal of making them more efficient. Although successful at solving problems, it’s clear that these years of work and millions of dollars have little impact on the macro cost and quality issues facing our country. The killer app and the platform are still out there.
After 20 years I have realized that there is a more fundamental problem that can’t be fixed through additive technologies. Step back and you see that, over time, we have built a system that is more and more dependent on middle men, relational databases, and their associated applications. The structural truth is clear to me now. The structural truth is the driver of unstable economic trends, unfair access, failures in preventable illness, suboptimal outcomes, rising out-of-pocket costs, and medical debt. All systems inherit the characteristics of their container, which in the United States is a fee-for-service marketplace that lacks any sort of rational, free-market characteristics. Anything built within this container is constrained by those characteristics. I don’t believe we can really solve anything building within the existing container.
Vikram: I think we would both agree that the existing container has worked well for now, but it’s not resilient enough to work for the problems that we will be facing in the near future. What are your thoughts on this?
John: Don’t get me wrong … the U.S. health system has been remarkably successful. More people die of old age than infectious disease. We have become experts at treating acute-care injuries and illnesses.
Our pharmaceuticals industry produced a vaccine to Zika in a remarkably short amount of time. I would not say our system is broken or in need of a do-over. It is working exactly as we designed it to work. It is a representation of the user stories and requirements that we drew up for its developers. People from around the world travel to the United States to receive world-class treatment. And we are rapidly exporting our (good and bad) expertise to the rest of the world.
What is clear is that we are no longer getting our money’s worth. The United States is approaching $5
trillion in spending and one third is waste. Medical errors are the third leading cause of mortality behind heart disease and cancer. Significant populations of people in the United States and around the world have poor access to care. We all live in environments where unhealthy influences, such as the consumption of sugar, have been institutionalized. Yesterday’s system we created was not designed to counterbalance the behaviors that have emerged as the leading causes of today’s cost and quality concerns. We are realizing that can’t be fixed with new applications on top of the as-designed system. We have to rebuild, taking advantage of our successes while optimizing for today’s social and economic truths.
Vikram: So what does the rebuild look like? What are the new user stories and requirements? Who are the new developers of this system? Can the current corporate interests be trusted to redesign a platform for the future? How do we get from here to there?
John: Hashed Health sees the blockchain as the protocol for the next generation of health solutions.
By moving trust to the protocol layer, we lay the foundation for leaner, more agile care delivery models, payment systems, value chains, and consumer experiences. It is not the answer to these questions. It allows innovators to have a new conversation free of today’s limiting factors. When combined with IoT, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, design thinking, and other tools, blockchain becomes a recipe for true disruption.
The path to real change in health care is through the consumer. One reason blockchain is an enabler of disruption in health care lies in its potential to change the consumer’s relationship with existing systems of health and wellness. It provides an alternative to today’s corporate-focused environment that has become a limiting factor for society. Users will interact with this new model through their mobile devices, which will leverage “wallet” software that will become more and more self-sovereign over time. Consumers will 198
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become prosumers with controls over their health assets. Patients will no longer be asked to join a series of siloed patient portals as they move through the continuum of care. This provides a more holistic approach across an individual’s related health, wellness, social, and socioeconomic events. We have learned that one’s health is so much more than the 5 percent fragments that happen during a clinical visit. Patients will be empowered to control their information and have the ability to donate or monetize their records as they wish. Over time, honeypots of medical records data will be decentralized and distributed, making the user’s information less susceptible to theft.
Vikram: By many standards, health care IT moves as a slow monolith. This might be due to design, but can you talk a bit more about why we don’t have a straightforward consumer-to-provider relationship in health IT, and health care more broadly?
John: The consumer-facing side of health IT is complicated. Consumerization of health care has been a buzzword for years now but has proven elusive. There are a few important reasons why this is true. First, on many levels, health care is not like other markets. Health care is not a traditional commodity or service to be purchased. Even if they were completely free to do so (more on this later), consumers are not in a position to make the best judgments about purchasing health care, either because of the complexity of health care treatments or due to the emergent need to seek care. Additionally, unlike almost all other products or services, a consumer cannot always predict the results of consuming health care. For example, purchasing a car produces predictable results: owning transportation equipment with stated features and in regulatory compliance. By contrast, a given treatment might or might not adequately address the illness or condition.
Beyond these economic basics, consumerization is complicated by the configuration of the health care system itself. The drive to “Uber-ize” health care runs head-on into the wall of the U.S. payment and delivery systems. The consumer has no knowledge of price for services. Providers themselves often cannot give pricing in advance. Furthermore, the consumer is not a party to the pricing agreement, as the contractual relationship is between the provider and the payor, on behalf of the consumer. These are all well-known, almost hackneyed issues related to U.S. health care. By themselves, they do not prevent the creation of potentially useful consumer tools. Instead, to have utility, consumer tools need to “plug in” to the systems that deliver and pay for health care services. Given the dizzying array of providers, payors, and service providers, as well as their oft-conflicting motivations, consumer tools are often stymied by the unwillingness of enterprises that control the health care marketplace. Consumerization of health care is elusive, not because of a lack of tools, but rather due to the lack of an open platform.
As groups of consumers organize or are convened in traditional and innovative ways, these groups will represent new centers of gravity for the future marketplace. The community or group (however you define it: village, employer, values-based group, nursing home, etc.) will also be empowered through the ability to organize, aggregate, and share. Similarly, groups of providers on the sell-side of the marketplace will organize (or be convened) into either traditional or innovative new cohorts for the provision of care in ways that are better, faster, and more economically rational than what can be delivered under today’s bloated market structure.
Vikram: How do you think the large enterprises (provider groups and insurance companies) will evolve to respond to the new opportunities such as blockchain?
John: Enterprises will, over time, be affected by new opportunities and challenges that result from changing market structures. The effects will be felt throughout today’s health care value chains, such as supply chain, revenue cycle, claims life cycle, clinical research, insurance and benefits, and clinical episodes. Audit and compliance activities will fall away to automation. Contracting, rebating, administrative fees, and discounting schemes will disappear or be transformed through the use of immutable, transparent shared ledgers. Closed relational databases like EMRs, ERPs, and materials management systems will evolve as the nature of their accounting functions move to the market level. Clinical trials programs will be optimized through sharing of information and streamlined administrative processes. Security will be enhanced and, over time, data honeypots will fall away to a decentralized structure.
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Companies will not throw away their existing databases (at least not at first). First, these legacy systems will transact with the blockchain through APIs and then, over time, we will begin to see new, nimble, ground-up systems emerge. These systems will transform how we currently think about the movement of health, data, clinical, and financial assets across a market.
Machines will also begin to play a larger role in health and wellness. We already see a role for connected health machines, wearables, and a host of Web-enabled monitoring devices. Blockchain provides the foundation for a more secure and scalable health IoT environment. Devices can be registered and validated more scalably using the blockchain as a shared ledger. As a result, information from these machines can be trusted. Transfer of ownership can also be tracked more easily and the operational life cycle of the device can be recorded. Perhaps most interestingly, the device itself can be given a wallet and a set of smart contracts that allow it to execute commands, transfer assets, and operate in ways that drive clinical and financial value for consumers or for the machines themselves!
This vision of the consumer, the community, the enterprise, and the machine is truly disruptive. It’s also a vision with many technical and nontechnical challenges.
Vikram: How do we get to the future that you described? What is the path to the consumer-driven future?
How do we create demonstrations that prove the value of the technology? How do we get people on board?
John: Health care is a fast-follower. It is historically resistant to platforms and “uberization” because of regulatory considerations, complexity, and aversion to risk. Blockchain technology is new. Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2009. Ethereum was created in the summer of 2015. Other protocols being considered for health care projects, such as Hyperledger Fabric, Tendermint, and other protocols, are even newer. EOS, Tezos, and NEO just arrived on the scene with their record-setting token sales and new ideas around governance, consensus, and scalability. Smart contracts are still not very smart and are even less secure. It’s anyone’s guess who the winners will be in five to ten years. If given the choice, the chefs in health care’s institutional kitchen would prefer to sit back and watch the technology marinate for a while.
The real limiting factor may actually be the nontechnical concerns. First, for blockchain solutions to be effective, you need a collaborative network of participants. This is why you read so much about consortia and blockchain. Without the consortium or the minimally viable network of participants, enterprise blockchain efforts are merely expensive academic exercises. Even if you have the network required, successful governance can be tricky. These collaborative concepts require some getting used to for some, a paradigm shift for most. Second, for certain use cases there are serious regulatory concerns that complicate productive use. Many great ideas will be limited by a regulatory framework that never imagined the decentralized marketplace. Third, there is still a significant amount of education and organization of the market required. After a year of operating our consortium, the majority of the market still needs consulting on what blockchain is, how it could affect their market structure, and why networks are key to success.
Fourth, we believe that the early efforts to establish blockchain and distributed ledger technologies as a viable solution will require simple demonstations of value. These early demonstrations will not be designed to change the world. They will solve simple, unsexy problems in today’s health system. As a result, there will be early complaints that these products do not deliver the value that blockchain had originally promised.
It will take some time to sort things out. For those of us who are early in the health care blockchain space, these are the complicated realities we face. The real question is timing.
Vikram: So, about the timing, how long do you think it will take for blockchain to become mainstream? How can we accelerate the time it takes to cross the chasm?
John: I often tell people that starting Hashed Health is the most excited and the most scared I have been in my professional career. From an innovator’s perspective, the blockchain health care space is a dream.
There is no template. Everything is new. The technology is new and immature. The collaborative innovation business model is new. The concept of “fat protocols” is new. We have to not only build products, we also have to build a market. We are innovating from every angle. Every day is a 3D chess match. It’s high-risk, high-reward research and development. For Hashed, it’s the most exciting opportunity imaginable.
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We chose the collaborative business model because it is in line with the spirit of the blockchain and it seemed like the only path to success when we started the company in 2016. Unlike previous startups, this was not a “build a product, sell a product” model. Although we had many strong use cases in the queue, we knew we could not place all our bets on one. The market wasn’t ready. We knew we needed to do more with less. The collaborative model allows for us to join together with industry thought leaders who can contribute to our ecosystems of shared value. By being a part of several successful projects with the companies that are using the products, we increase our odds that our products will gain productive use. We also lower the risks and increase the rewards for our customers. It was the only way, especially in a new and complex market.
Once we made this decision, we were quickly branded a consortium. We have never been comfortable with this label, although we struggled to come up with anything better. We are more like a mesh network or a product studio. At the end of the day, Hashed Health is a products company with many successful solutions in our portfolio. In many ways, any company building blockchain products is a consortium if they want to be successful. The network is often more important than the product itself. It’s the relationship between the two where we spend a lot of our energy, because that’s where success lies.
Vikram: So how do we start building the network? Currently, there is a lack of awareness and understanding in the health care space about blockchain technology. How do we bring the providers up to speed and get them interested?
John: To begin, we knew we needed to do a lot of thought leadership work to educate and organize the industry. We researched the technology heavily and we connected what was happening outside health care to our professional and personal health care experience. We invested heavily in research. After a time, we began our thought leadership work. We blogged, wrote newsletters, and spoke at conferences. We listened to the feedback we received and we iterated on our ideas and early products. We used those early products to recruit the initial members. At first we developed really complicated contracts, and then we simplified them to make getting started as easy as possible. We evolved into a structure that can flex governance, business, and technical requirements as needed based on the workgroup and the product. This allows us to meet a customer where they are, rather than forcing them down a contractual pathway that might be scary or uncomfortable. We started with larger organizations and we are now opening membership and workgroup activities up to earlier stage companies, universities, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders so that we can bring more contributors into the emerging networks.
Vikram: Can you talk a bit more about how the Hashed Health model benefits the members? What’s the current structure of Hashed Health?
John: Our goal with our members is to build community and products that make meaningful use of the strengths of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. We seek out members who will contribute to a project and a conversation, not just look to extract value from the group. We consider ourselves a health care company first, so the projects we work on must have the patients’ best interests in mind.
Our members usually engage as general members who need some consulting before they are ready to build. The level of business and technical expertise inside health care institutions is very weak, so a consultative approach is required. Members usually have a concept or two that they believe they’d like to tackle, but they always require some guidance and some preparation prior to development. By providing health care expertise and blockchain expertise, we are able to deliver a unique product that drives productive use case concepts forward in a more efficient manner. By creating collaborative agreements, we can build incentives that support accomplishing rational milestones on the pathway from concept to productive use.
Each of our networks has its own constituents, cadence, business plan, technical plan, governance structure, and personality. Each is focused on solving a specific business problem, and we choose the protocol that fits the business need. Currently we have built products and demos on Hyperledger Fabric, Ethereum, a commercial platform called BitSE, and Tendermint and Ethermint. We are currently researching other protocols and various middleware products including Gem, Bloq, Nuco, Stratumn, Tezos, 201
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EOS, and IOTA. The workgroups all share common learning and best practices that translate across projects.
We have experts (either in house or contracted) who can support any discussion (technical, business, legal, regulatory) required to advance a product.
To cross the chasm, we feel it is important to begin with simple demonstrations of value. The simpler the better. We prefer projects that are not highly political, that do not require protected information, and that solve a problem in today’s environment while laying the foundation for our vision of the future.
Vikram: Let’s get into the portfolio of operational working groups within Hashed Health and the current target areas. Can you elaborate on some of the use -cases for us and how they’re using the blockchain?
John: At the time of writing, Hashed Health has five active enterprise groups.
1.
Provider Identity
2.
Patient Identity
3.
Payments
4.
Supply Chain IoT
5.
Clinical IoT (Wearables)
We are also in the process of forming several new enterprise groups that we expect to have operational soon, including:
1.
Disease Registries
2.
Clinical Trials
3.
Medical Records
4.
Pharma Revenue Cycle
5.
Enterprise Resource Management Systems
These are areas where the Hashed team has both expertise and customer interest. The general membership dues support the initial business case and technical research. Once there is a decision to build, customers are required to enter a secondary development agreement specific to the project.
Perhaps the most popular example of our work is decentralized physician identity. Provider identity and its related data is foundational to the delivery of care today and in the future. From graduate medical education to stat licensing, medical staff credentialing, and payer contracting, the ready availability and reliability of data about a provider’s identity, credentials, and reputation are paramount to ensuring patient safety and high-quality care. Globally, the world is facing a shortage of qualified health workers. That shortage is estimated to be 7.9 million and it is expected to grow to 12.9 million health workers by 2035.
A crucial challenge amidst this shortage is the ability to identify, locate, and communicate with workers in remote locations. The single provider’s identity is a complex tangle of data points. There are multiple elements held by multiple disparate stakeholders, such as medical schools, state licensing boards, and more. Some elements remain static over time (e.g., graduate degree), and others are dynamic over time (e.g., licensure, affiliation, residence, and contact information).
In this use case, we treat data fields as individual data assets. Providers and credentialing stakeholders jointly manage a distributed provider profile registry. Cryptographic signatures ensure primary source verification of essential credentials and certifications, allowing distributed networks to share real-time updates of crucial data. This process significantly reduces time, expense, and wasteful manual processes that happen today. This use case is attractive because it is fairly straightforward technically, it is not political, the data are not sensitive, and no key stakeholder has a competitive interest. We would argue that it is a good blockchain use case because provider identity is not centralized and there are currently trust and incentive issues that need to be overcome. Although there are current efforts underway to centralize this information, 202
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the various data elements are not centrally granted, administered, or consumed. An easily auditable market-level data structure will deliver trust and efficiency in a market that currently has neither.
In this example, you can see how Hashed Health has seeded a market with a simple product built on a simple, yet impactful use case. Blockchain allows us to tackle this problem in a way that was not previously imaginable.
We are equally excited about our other foundational use cases. We are working with providers on patient registration authority products. We are working with a multiconstituent workgroup on an exciting payments model that links payments to benefits and behavior. We are working with government institutions on public health surveillance and clinical trials decentralization. We have begun an exciting journey that continues to pick up momentum, new ideas, and additional expertise in both blockchain and specific health care subject matter.
Vikram: One major problem with blockchain integration into health care is concerns about privacy.
Blockchain was designed to be anonymized, but for health data, we need this interesting combination of trusted miners, completely private transactions, and yet network consensus on the blockchain. What are your thoughts on the evolution of privacy?
John: We are the first to admit that health care is just getting started and things are not perfect at this early stage. A good example of the immaturity is evident in the conversations we have around public vs. private blockchains. The key distinction is that whereas permissioned blockchains are merely distributed solutions, open blockchains offer real decentralization. From a technical perspective, we choose the protocol based on the problem we are solving. We are comfortable with the concept of the blockchain actually representing a spectrum of trust-based transactional systems ranging from open and decentralized to private and distributed. We believe that the industry will move toward open and public blockchains, but it might take time to get there. Health care enterprises, much like financial services and other enterprises, value greater levels of control and, perhaps most important, levels of confidentiality that currently are not possible on open, truly decentralized blockchains. It is indisputable that for a range of business use cases, permissioned blockchains are an ideal fit. We believe it will take time for companies to become comfortable with the more traditional blockchain models, even though it’s clear those models offer the greatest security.
It is important to critically examine where this preference for control can become a damaging and self-defeating prejudice. Open and decentralized blockchains are continuing to explode onto the scene.
The top two cryptocurrencies alone account for $65 billion in market capitalization. Further, the newer trend of initial coin offerings (ICOs) have attracted over $1 billion via crowdfunding for mostly open source, decentralized blockchain platforms. The overwhelming level of interest in and financial backing for these open platforms cannot be ignored, nor should they be. They signal a massive opportunity for both individuals and businesses to think differently about the concepts of ownership, control of the network, and funding for infrastructure that supports the common good. This could be very important in funding platforms that challenge the current corporatocracy. In health care, we could fund massive public infrastructure projects that put the power of health and wellness in the hands of the true customers. That’s powerful and it’s hard to imagine how that would get funded through traditional means.
Setting aside technical issues of confidential transactions and PHI on blockchains, the prospect of health care businesses operating on open networks is truly daunting to many businesses. Centralization, consolidation, and ever-widening control of health care networks has been the dominant business strategy for the industry for decades, especially since the introduction of the Affordable Care Act. Business success in health care has primarily come from ever greater control of value chains focusing on covered lives, pharmaceuticals, claims, specialty networks, outpatient facilities, and supplies. It is clear that too much value is being extracted by value chain participants today. An open blockchain solution exposes these relationships and forces reintermediation with lighter, more nimble value-adding actors. The uncomfortable question that blockchain technology poses for the health care industry is the unconventional yet tangible opportunities that open, decentralized networks offer for true value-added health care services.
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Vikram: As the blockchain matures, where do you see the main value being created? We spoke earlier about the fat protocols creating and capturing value at the architecture level, but what about the network?
John: In today’s health care industry, owning and operating the network is the ultimate business goal. The consumers of health care services have very little market power with choices limited by arcane and opaque contractual relationships that define today’s health care networks. They cannot assemble their own networks of providers and services; they cannot negotiate on price or other value-added services. Instead consumers are “steered.” But an open, decentralized market for health care services would enable the consumer be free to make rational economic decisions. An open network has to be free of the perverse incentives that constrain choice and drive patient steerage. The essential difference between the status quo and the promise of decentralized networks is this: Running a decentralized network is not a business in and of itself.
So far health care has resisted the platform movement. In a short period of time we have watched as Uber, Airbnb, and others have disrupted several traditional industries. Health care leaders have watched those markets change with some comfort in the reality that their existing health care value chains are too complex, too regulated, and too sensitive to failure. Resting on these assumptions might be a mistake. The costs are becoming unsustainable and consumers are demanding another door.
Open blockchain platforms are a new reality that health care needs to recognize and embrace. Hashed Health plans to move in this direction and will continue to promote open solutions. These systems, protocols, and tools are maturing rapidly and will not go away. They are proving their economic viability.
The platform itself is built on open source software. Organizations such as nonprofit foundations now have the means to raise sufficient funds to launch these platforms. Incentive and fee structures can be implemented to fund ongoing operations, making the platform truly self-sufficient. The core blockchain innovation of decentralized networks supporting common transactional systems can keep the platform in the centralized control of any single entity. Open governance models continue to be refined.
Value on open networks is defined purely by economic fundamentals of the services being offered.
By contrast, the closed ecosystems of the health care industry seem to thrive on distorting true value by constraining choices. Tremendous cost and expensive administrative inefficiencies are in some sense a necessity designed to amass control over the network itself. By giving up control of the basic platform itself, health care enterprises can be economically rewarded by providing valued services with much lower burden of overhead and administrative cost.
The most important point is that open decentralized networks are not fundamentally incompatible with health care, despite privacy and regulatory concerns. Technical barriers will soon give way to innovations such as “zero-knowledge proofs” and other means of executing confidential blockchain transactions. The true barrier is an entrenched business mind-set that will become obsolete in time. It is not a matter of if, but when open health care networks will take root. In the short term, we need private networks to demonstrate value and move the conversation forward. Hashed will be a leader in developing these networks as a step-wise approach to the eventual reality that open blockchains will deliver the most disruptive and effective solutions. It is those enterprises that can give up white-knuckled control of the networks that will reap the greatest opportunity.
Vikram: Finally, I have to ask you about the recent ICO craze. Every blockchain company is trying to do an ICO, which reminds me of the late 1990s environment. Is Hashed Health going to do an ICO? What and how will the tokens be used?
John: We have also developed expertise in tokenization, and we believe that one or more of our products will have a meaningful, token-centric architecture. The concept of a token offering is exciting because it has the potential to fund infrastructure concepts for public health. Designed effectively, tokens can also help deliver on the promise of intelligent value exchange in health care. Programmable payments are an incredible opportunity to improve how money flows in health care today, creating better incentive structures that result in the alignment we have been missing for so long, especially when it comes to physician and patient behavior. Dr. Rasu Shrestha said it well: “At the end of the day, innovation is really about behavior change, whether it’s a clinician putting in an order, that radiologist making a specific diagnosis or call on a finding, 204
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or the patient making a decision to eat that muffin versus going for that salad. Innovation is about behavior change” (see https://www.healthcare-informatics.com/article/upmc-s-rasu-shrestha-innovation-
about-behavior-change-technology-should-be-invisible).
We are in no rush to jump into the ICO craze, preferring to take our time and make sure the token mechanism is integral to the product and the token sale is offered in a way that satisfies the interests of our constituents while getting the token into the hands of those who will use it. No one can ignore the power of this innovation. A team of engineers anywhere in the world can make available a secure financial system with clear benefits over what exists today. It’s a model that makes it difficult for traditional systems and conventionally funded startups to compete.
We feel confident that several of our use cases and pending partnerships have tokenization opportunities. We see tokens as a new, better container than what we have today. We are extremely interested in and excited by the emerging relationship between companies and tokens in the health industry. We are also interested to see if we can apply our same collaborative principles to the token distribution concept, especially in the areas of governance and coordination models.
The value that Hashed Health delivers is simple and necessary at this stage of market and product building. We are a health care company first, which means we have the patient as our primary consideration.
Our team averages 15 years in health care technology. We know health care and we are able to connect challenges in health care with the possibilities of blockchain. This means we are really good at health care blockchain use cases. Second, in a world where the technology is changing rapidly, we do not lock customers into a specific technology. Not every protocol or middleware solution is perfect for a specific business problem. At Hashed, the protocol supports the problem. Third, our collaborative approach lowers the risk and increases the likelihood of success for projects. The “build it and they will come” model results in an expensive academic exercise. There’s a better path where you can distribute the costs and the rewards across a network of collaborators who are organized around success. We have created a company and a business model that fits the spirit of the decentralized health solutions we build. Together we will innovate and together we will accelerate the meaningful productive use and realize the potential of blockchain in health care.
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