Tag: Hospital

Any hospital has a lot to gain a lot by adopting blockchain technology through various use cases like patient mediated data and provider authentication.

Pharmeum: The world’s first Blockchain and AI platform enabling access to affordable, digital healthcare globally

Healthcare has exploded with growth numerous times over the last few decades—technology additions such as EKG/EEGs, MRI/fMRIs, robotic surgery options, and more have kept healthcare at the forefront of technological advancement. A new project, Pharmeum.io is working toward a safer healthcare industry.

In these periods of explosive growth, however, many important things have been forgotten, such as refining the prescription process and the rest of the pharmaceutical supply chain.

How Pharmeum Prevents Human Error in Pharmacy

Pharmeum allows doctors, pharmacies, regulators, and patients to coexist in an ecosystem powered by honesty. Doctors’ prescription histories are available at will and patients’ health history can be monitored to prevent incorrect medication or dosage instructions.

By overlaying the current, digital-analog hybrid system into a fully digital, blockchain-based system, Pharmeum is allowing doctors to reduce their amount of wasted effort and reducing the potential for incorrect diagnosis, treatment, and prescription assignment. This can be accomplished by using tablets and laptops for medical record collection and dissemination as well as implementing a medication pad.

What Can Pharmeum’s Ideal Business Structure Do?

The Pharmeum roadmap highlights heavy reliance on technology that, once achieved, can help with predictive medical care by analyzing patient health history and evolving patterns as well as provide definite auditability of prescriptions and medication flows.

Building on the overlay mentioned above, Pharmeum is working to include an artificial intelligence aspect which will let them process patient history, family history, symptom information, and other data to create diagnoses earlier in case of terminal illness. This both reduces costs and helps improve patient satisfaction and quality of life.

Time savings

We’ve all been caught in line at the pharmacy while they call our physician and verify the prescription—especially for treatments we receive regularly. Why does this process remain so complicated, wasting precious minutes and hours of our lives? Pharmeum seeks to resolve this issue with blockchain, writing review periods into prescription smart contracts to minimize the time individuals spend waiting on medication.

Other areas of healthcare that can receive efficiency increases include:

  • Health insurance claim
  • New patient intake
  • Medical questionnaires
  • Referral visits

Treatment accuracy

According to the British Medical Journal, 70 percent of medication-related treatment errors come from the prescribing process alone. 80 percent of these could be reduced or eliminated with an efficient, digitized prescription system. Overall, medical error ranks third for cause of death, accounting for over half as many deaths as cancer.

Cost reduction

NHS hospitals in the U.S. spend 25 percent of their budget on administrative tasks—one-quarter of the total spending is ripe for disruption and offers huge potential for cost reduction. Globally, the U.S. spends 20 percent of the entire GDP on healthcare. Cost reduction in medical facilities can act to lower healthcare costs across the board. Other areas for cost reduction include early-stage diagnosis, prescription cost consistency, and time inefficiency for doctors.

According to Forbes, patients overpay for their medication 23 percent of the time.

What does Pharmeum’s token ecosystem look like?

Technology included in Pharmeum blockchain includes zero-knowledge proofs, prescription tokens, medicine asset tokens, and PHRM tokens. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) will be stored off-chain, while non-PII will be stored on-chain for use with artificial intelligence and other factors.

PHRM tokens can be used to pay for medical care, second opinions, medicine, and other beneficial healthcare expenses. Patients will receive PHRM tokens for sharing their healthcare data with other businesses—a more common model in the blockchain-based economies which are currently springing up around the globe.

Token allocation data:

Pharmeum Token Cap: 750,000,000

ICO Tokens Sold: 55% including pre-sale

Team & Partner Tokens Held: 20%

Ticker: PHRM

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How Artificial Intelligence Will Affect Health Care In The Future?

Neil Jacobstien, chairman of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Robotics Track at Singularity University , says artificial intelligence makes things humans couldn’t do before possible. He adds that AI has the ability to deliver billions of dollars worth of value and real help to clinicians in the healthcare industry.

The impact of artificial intelligence on healthcare

AI has already entered the medical industry; it is being deployed in predictive analytics in patient monitoring devices, drug discovery, oncology, imaging, etc.

With increasing computing power and advances in machine learning and analytical algorithms, AI systems will become more powerful and effective in performance, revolutionizing medical diagnostics, treatment and research.

AI is expected to be useful in many areas of the healthcare industry.
Uses of AI technology in the healthcare industry

There are many ways AI will help the healthcare industry. Here are some of the most significant ways artificial intelligence is shaping the future of health care:

Enhanced diagnostic procedures

There are many diagnostic procedures in the medical industry that still depend on the collection of tissue samples. These existing procedures present the risks inherent to all invasive procedures. According to medical experts, AI technology may soon replace the requirement of biological tissue samples for diagnoses. It may give technicians the ability to identify and characterize tumours through image-based diagnostics.

Ideally, AI technology in the future, may enable specialists to collect the same detailed information collected from real tissue samples. For instance, with malignant tumours, AI will give specialists the ability to understand how an entire tumour affects a patient.  

Introduction of brain-computer interfaces

Computers have long been used for communication. However, scientists are searching for ways to create direct interfaces between computers and the human brain, which will significantly benefit patients. In the cases of accidents and neurological diseases, patients often lose their ability to speak, interact and move. AI-enabled brain-computer interfaces could potentially restore these abilities efficiently and in a meaningful way.

Physicians are also expecting that it will enable injured or ill patients to quickly restore their functionality. AI-based brain-computer interfaces may allow researchers to decipher the neural activities related to physical functions, helping afflicted patients to communicate immediately.

Decreased cost of care-giving

According to the management consulting company, Accenture, AI could provide healthcare organizations an annual savings of $150 billion by 2026. This revolutionary and smart technology has the ability to give health care firms the power to utilize the information generated by progressively connected information networks and medical devices. AI could help organizations cut costs and improve treatment outcomes significantly while lowering operational expenses.

According to Global management consultancy McKinsey & Company, potential annual savings of AI in healthcare is expected to be $300 billion USD (United Sates Dollar) in the United States and £3.3 billion in the United Kingdom.  

AI, through robotics, will reduce healthcare costs and increase performance.
Robotics in the healthcare industry

The increasing growth of digital information and big data systems present artificial intelligence a potentially crucial resource for collecting and extracting meaningful insight from increasingly smarter health care data networks.

In the near future, diagnostic technicians and wellness and lifestyle consultants may be able to leverage AI and wearable devices to optimize their medical services and improve treatment outcomes. As AI technology matures, it will improve the treatment outcomes and the operational efficiency of care, while decreasing the overall cost.

Automation of repetitive tasks

Health care firms constantly look for different ways to improve community health, and they also keep investigating the possibilities of AI implementation in many lucrative ways. Eventually, AI programs will enable organizations to discover new correlations among huge amounts of data. AI technology will allow health care organizations to automate their routine repetitive tasks and streamline their operations in various ways.  

It will improve the ability of care providers to deliver faster, more accurate and more precise services. Hospitals and devices will be generating and using an enormous amount of valuable and useful patient information at a surprisingly fast speed and accuracy.

Final words — Other potential benefits of AI

AI technology will solve one of the major roadblocks of the systems used in the healthcare industry. Advanced AI systems that can communicate with patients and make accurate diagnoses at the screening process will enable the growth of their availability and space.

In the future, AI technology is going to introduce hybrid models to be used in the medical industry. These models will aid technicians in diagnoses, treatment planning and identifying risk factors while retaining responsibilities for the patient’s care. It will result in faster adoption by healthcare providers by mitigating potential risks and start delivering measurable improvements in patient outcomes and operational efficiency at scale.

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Abid Hospital in Pakistan Accepts PakCoin Cryptocurrency

The Abid Hospital in Islamabad, Pakistan, has become the first hospital in Asia to accept payments in cryptocurrency. Patients get a 20% discount when they pay in Pakcoins.

PakCoin Cryptocurrency

Abid is a fairly new hospital, opened in January 2015. It is primarily a surgical facility and lists a staff of nine doctors. It accepts a limited number of charity cases.

While Bitcoin remains secure as the world’s leading cryptocurrency, it has become less suitable for some purposes than it used to be. It was the first of its kind, and its creator, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, didn’t expect today’s widespread use. Transactions require confirmation for recipients to be sure they’ve been paid; otherwise, dishonest people could spend the same money twice. The time to complete confirmation has grown long, sometimes taking hours.  The associated fees have grown large enough to discourage Bitcoin’s use for small payments.

Many alternative currencies have entered the competition, offering solutions to these problems. PakCoin is specifically aimed at Pakistanis, though it can be used anywhere. Up to 150,000 Pakistanis can get 50 Pakcoins (a very small amount at current exchange rates) for free. It claims “nearly instant transactions” and very low or zero processing fees. It’s derived from Litecoin, which was designed to handle higher transaction volumes than Bitcoin. Like Litecoin, it relies on an algorithm known as scrypt.

Pakcoin and Litecoin use the same blockchain concepts as Bitcoin. There are multiple copies of the ledger. New blocks are created by “mining,” which requires computational effort and is rewarded by newly created units of currency. The code is open source.

The advantages of cryptocurrency

An interview with the developer of Pakcoin (who goes by the name Pakcoin) discloses some of its purposes. A key goal is to make it usable for ordinary people who don’t know much about cryptocurrency or blockchains. Eventually people will be able to associate wallets with user names, so that they can accept payments at an address with a recognizable name.

Pakistan isn’t a wealthy country. The average annual income is about $1500 in US currency. Investment and savings are low. Only 15% of Pakistanis have bank accounts. Cryptocurrency can be a useful tool for people who don’t have bank accounts or credit cards. The challenges in Pakistan are strong; only about a quarter of the population has a mobile Internet connection. Smartphone adoption is growing fast, though, and could exceed 50% by 2020.

The risks

Cryptocurrency remains risky. Some currencies have collapsed when their development teams fell apart. People who put all their money into Pakcoin could get rich or lose everything.

Any new way of doing business opens up avenues for fraud, since most people don’t understand it in detail and can be tricked. If user names become a common way of designating wallets, spoofing of names will inevitably follow. Fraudulent exchanges will try to cheat people, taking money outright or misrepresenting market exchange rates.

The value of a cryptocurrency comes from its usefulness in exchange, and every organization that accepts payment in it adds to its legitimacy and stability. In some parts of the world, such as Pakistan, more people have cell phones than have bank accounts. Cryptocurrency payments stand a reasonable chance of being widely adopted, since they’re a more accessible option for a large part of the population.

Abid Hospital is small and new, but it might be the start of a trend. As more organizations adopt digital currency as a payment option, it will become more familiar, and the currency will stabilize. There are still many ways the scenario could go wrong, but it’s a trend worth watching.

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