Tag: DokChain

DokChain is a blockchain-based network of transaction processors operating on both financial and clinical data across the healthcare industry.

PointNurse: blockchain enabled telemedicine

Founded in 2014, PointNurse is a telemedicine provider and “global virtual care community.” PointNurse employs blockchain technology to give “care credits” to nurses, doctors and other participating healthcare professionals toward profit sharing and potential equity in the company, based on activity and performance.

PointNurse: blockchain enabled telemedicine using “care credits”

The uniqueness of the PointNurse model lies in the company’s “member-owner program.” The top-performing, most proactive nurses, doctors and other healthcare providers in the PointNurse community will not only earn income from their “virtual visits” with patients, but will have the opportunity to participate in profit-sharing while accumulating credits toward equity in the company. These “care credits” are blockchain-based tokens that providers earn for several “markers” of participation, including:

  • Hours spent on-call
  • New PointNurse members recruited
  • Quality of care markers

At the end of the year, PointNurse calculates the total credits for each of its members, which in turn determines their “pro-rata share” of the “community’s profits” for the year. At the same time, PointNurse keeps track of each member’s cumulative lifetime care credits. In the event of a “merger, sale, or IPO,” each member can then redeem their credits for any “pro-rata equity gains” that result.

PointNurse believes that their member-owner program, together with its unique care credits, distinguishes them from conventional, “transactional” telemedicine providers.

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Image source: PointNurse.com

The PointNurse mobile app

At the center of the PointNurse offering is the PointNurse app, found at the Apple app store. PointNurse describes the consumer-facing aspect of their app as a convenient way to have a “virtual visit” with a medical professional “from home, work or on the road,” at a cost of one dollar per minute. Furthermore, patients can use the PointNurse site to find nurse practitioners and medical doctors, organized by time zone and state.

The company describes the counterpart provider-facing aspect of their app as a free platform for verified, licensed providers who wish to register to receive “video requests” (whether scheduled or “on-demand”) from new and existing patients. In order to participate, all that a healthcare professional needs is a computer with a working camera, connected to the Internet. And there are no fixed hours. PointNurse aims for “flexibility and freedom,” encouraging participants to work from home on their own schedules.

Connection to HealthCombix

In September of 2016, Alex Danzberger, Senior VP at Unitek, joined the PointNurse advisory board. In addition, he made an investment not only in PointNurse, but HealthCombix, which PointNurse “spun off” at that time. HealthCombix builds distributed, blockchain-based apps that bring together systems “at the nexus of healthcare, pharma and insurance.” In particular, HealthCombix aims to encourage patient support groups by providing patients’ friends and family with “rewards for helping patients reach health goals.” This aspect of their model is similar to PointNurse’s care-credit approach, but aimed primarily at caregivers rather than providers. However, under the HealthCombix model, the patients receive rewards for reaching their goals as well. And rather than redeeming rewards for a share of company profits or equity, patients and caregivers alike can redeem them at participating “food, housing and community outlets.”

Advocates for blockchain in healthcare

Aside from their significance as a standalone startup, the PointNurse team has advocated strongly for bringing blockchain into the healthcare industry in general and the nursing profession in particular. For example, a 2016 post on the PointNurse blog envisions a “decentralized autonomous nursing organization” or “DANO,” that will make full of use of blockchain to disrupt and transform the multi-billion dollar nurse-staffing industry. They have also advocated for “out-of-hospital blockchains.”

Funding and future

PointNurse has yet to emerge from the seed-funding stage, or at least has not yet announced an institutional round of funding. Therefore, they may not have the resources to move toward their goals at the same speed as more high-profile startups in the blockchain healthcare space such as Gem Health and DokChain, both of which have institutionally-backed parent companies (Gem and Pokitdok, respectively). Nonetheless, PointNurse continues to show signs of life as they evolve toward their goals at their own pace. On April 20th, 2017, PointNurse announced that Elaine Comeau, a former executive at Philips Healthcare with a “distinguished career working in telehealth” would become the company’s new CEO. Ms. Comeau’s vision for the company continues to embrace blockchain.

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DokChain by PokitDok – Blockchain for Healthcare

PokitDok, a healthcare software platform provider, has recently introduced a new offering: DokChain, “blockchain for healthcare.” PokitDok envisions DokChain helping usher in a new era of value-based care handled (in the background) primarily by artificial intelligence (AI), rather than Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). This new breed of AI, in the form of “smart contracts,” will reside on DokChain, the company’s secure blockchain-based network. PokitDok’s expanding set of APIs will, in turn, connect all healthcare participants to the AI-rich DokChain and to each other. An impressive initial group of leading technology and healthcare partners, collectively the “DokChain Health Alliance,” has already signed on to lead the effort. And parent PokitDok’s $5M round of funding in March will certainly help fuel DokChain’s development for the remainder of 2017.

The vision of DokChain

DokChain made its formal debut on September 27th, 2016 at the Health 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, California. According to PokitDok Co-founder and CEO Lisa Maki, the introduction of blockchain in general (and DokChain in particular) into the healthcare system is part of the shift to value-based care. Maki argues that as the shift progresses, it’s becoming increasing clear that EMRs are no longer the sole repository of healthcare data. As a result, the push toward shared EMRs is at least partly misguided. After all, the EMR cannot capture the complete set of important events contributing to the patient’s overall “episode of care.” However, “smart contracts” can. These digital contracts, also known as “self-executing contracts” or “blockchain contracts” are a new breed of artificial intelligence (AI). Roughly speaking, smart contracts serve as ultra-efficient legal agents that can create, store and enforce contracts supporting the exchange of various forms of value (e.g. property, stock, money, etc.) on the blockchain in real-time. Accordingly, smart contracts, rather than the EMR, according to Maki, will emerge as the central medium for handling healthcare data in the future.

DokChain 

The role of DokChain

CEO Maki envisions DokChain connecting all endpoints (participants and stakeholders) in the healthcare ecosystem into a single secure blockchain network. These endpoints will not only include EMRs, but devices such as heart monitors. After pulling in data from all the endpoints participating in a given “episode of care,” DokChain records it, while handling permissions through “access grants” that DokChain “maintains and verifies.” The result is a distributed network of secure, richly organized healthcare data for stakeholders to track and share.

The role of PokitDok

According to Maki, although DokChain will serve as the blockchain network itself, PokitDok will provide the APIs connecting all of the following endpoints to the network and its “smart contract services”:

  • Thirty party applications (more than 4,000).
  • Insurance companies (more than 500).
  • “[A]ll registered healthcare providers.”

Use case: Insurance benefit check

On stage at the Health 2.0 conference, Maki walked the audience through four steps in a typical use case—running a check to determine if one’s health insurance will cover a knee examination:

  1. The PokitDok Eligibility API calls a smart contract on the DokChain that handles eligibility.
  2. The smart contract verifies that the requester has permission to access the health insurance benefit data.
  3. The smart contract requests the benefit data from the health insurance provider, in this case Cigna.
  4. Cigna returns the benefits data “in less than a second.”

Maki emphasizes that the benefits data itself is not stored on the DokChain, but rather in the secure PokitDok Platform. What is stored on DokChain are “access grants” to the benefits data, along with a complete record of the transaction that participants can access and share, subject to their permissions.

PokitDok Partners

DokChain has announced an impressive list of initial partners:

  • Microsoft
  • GE Healthcare
  • Adventist Healthcare
  • The Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System

This group, along with others, are joining forces in the DokChain Health Alliance (initially called “the Blockchain Alliance,” but later renamed) which Maki boldly claims will “ultimately define the future of blockchain in our industry.”

Funding

In March, 2017, GIS Strategic Ventures (of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America) announced an investment of $5M in PokitDok. The company plans to use the funds not only to further develop DokChain, but to expand their existing API service.

The investment round brings PokitDok’s total fundraising to date to $48M.

Overall, DokChain is off to a strong start. It has set a clear strategic goal for itself of becoming the AI-run blockchain network for the era of value-based care; it has established a path to integration with the wealth of APIs that its parent company continues to expand; it has landed an impressive set of initial partners with the DokChain Health Alliance; and it has attracted ample funding, alongside parent PokitDok, with March’s $5M round. Although there are other ambitious contenders, such as Gem Health, vying to become “the blockchain of healthcare,” DokChain has come out of the gate with a lot of promise.

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