dHealth’s Blockchain Technology Powering Healthcare

Information is the most valuable asset one can have. With the information that is received in a timely manner—financial portfolios can be increased by many factors, or it can even significantly improve one’s health conditions, and save lives.

The goal of dHealth is to do exactly the latter—save lives with the timely provision of data to healthcare participants—as well as increase the healthcare’s potential to improve our lives.

The dHealth Network will achieve its goal by utilizing the power of the blockchain technology!

This utilization is already well underway as several projects have already been deployed—and many more are coming soon. To better understand dHealth’s goal and mission—let us observe how the blockchain technology has already begun to change the Healthcare landscape.

Rabies Vaccine Tracking

Dog mediated rabies is killing 60,000 people worldwide—every year. This is why Swiss TPH, a world-renowned global health institute—started the project “BLOCKRABIES – Blockchain high-coverage rabies post-exposure prophylaxis to achieve zero human rabies deaths in Africa”. The project is funded by the European & developing countries clinical trials partnership—which has been joined by many institutions, healthcare participants & researchers—including the dHealth Foundation!

The aim of the project is, as the title of the project claims—to avert any possible deaths or serious conditions as a result of being exposed to rabies. This will be possible by precisely tracking each vaccine recipient as well as their health status and health changes.

dHealth—as a part of this very important project that is being deployed in Mali and Ivory Coast— is providing the blockchain infrastructure for the tracking of the rabies vaccines.

To be more precise—the dHealth blockchain will be used to store supply chain data of the vaccines in order to make the data accessible to all the partners in the project. Because of that, each project participant will know exactly where the vaccine doses are. The process that is performed to achieve the project’s goal is the following: the code of the individual doses is scanned and stored on the dHealth blockchain while the health workers performing this task—get rewarded for doing so. Moreover, a link to the off-chain health record of the patients will be stored as well.

The project is currently in the implementation phase—make sure to follow dHealth’s Social Media to find out all the developments regarding this project—and all others!

Health Certificates

With 5,000,000 dead, more than 18 million currently infected by SARS-Cov-2, a large but unknown number of people with serious Post-COVID conditions and the fact that the pandemic has no end in sight—a serious question arises: how can we utilize the blockchain technology to assist us in these difficult times?

A clear answer to this question has been provided by researchers and Healthcare participants—we need to track the infected, as well as the vaccinated—in order to reduce the effects of the pandemic, and hopefully stop it as well.

So far governments have rolled out mainly proprietary technology that has significant compatibility issues, or even relied on easily falsified paper certificates to address this issue.

This has of course given rise to a significant increase in the likelihood of people trying to cheat the system—which has become evident in many countries.

That is why a fraud-proof certificate system is necessary if we are to rein in this new disease. Luckily blockchain technology has all the merits—and more, that are needed to provide the solution. 

Practicality, inability to tamper with the data and super efficiency are some of the merits of the decentralized certificate system that dHealth is providing through the utilization of the blockchain technology.

The dHealth Foundation has developed an open health certificate registry where the digital twin of a test or vaccination on the blockchain can be used even to verify it independently. The solution is currently being used by Roche Ukraine to protect their workforce.

Improving treatment of hemophilia patients

Poor data quality and a lack of treatment monitoring in everyday life makes it difficult to allocate the appropriate treatment and medication to hemophilia patients. 

dHealth’s technology will enable researchers to acquire key data necessary to provide better treatment and better medication.

That is why dHealth partnered together with a Patient Advocacy Group and a Swiss-based pharma company—to implement the blockchain-based app Centiva Life. The app incentivizes patients or the family of child patients—to provide real-world data that can be used by healthcare researchers.

Blockchain technology is being used to preserve the privacy of the patients—by using a GDPR compatible data handling method. Digital Health Points (DHP) are transferred to patients for the data provision. All the while, patients and their families can use the DHP tokens to redeem benefits.

After one year of preparation which was hampered by the pandemic—the first patients have been onboarded in January 2021. It is the expectation of all parties involved that the existing patient registry data will improve, therefore, therapy outcomes for hemophilia patients will as well.

Management of Respiratory Diseases

In December 2020, dHealth together with the Vietnam National Lung Hospital—successfully rolled out a program to help patients suffering from tuberculosis. This project aims to improve tuberculosis treatment adherence, as well as strengthen the knowledge base for patient treatment and care.

The goal of the project is immensely important for patients with tuberculosis because tuberculosis is highly stigmatized and when diagnosed—the patients initially take their medication but once they feel better they stop taking it!

This in turn often results in antibiotic resistance, wherein this antibiotic resistance coupled with the fact that Tuberculosis patients often don’t come back to follow-up consultations—can result in further spreading of the disease and even death of the patients.

The adherence to treatment is achieved by providing tuberculosis patients with DHP tokens for regularly filling out questionnaires via the dHealth Centiva app, as well as for regular follow-up consultations.

The DHP tokens can be used to redeem services, such as X-ray scans—in the National Lung Hospital.

The goal of the project is to include 5,000 Tuberculosis patients at the NLH annually, and in parallel to extend data collection to patients suffering from different respiratory diseases.

The project has been currently put on hold because of the COVID19 pandemic, however—it is expected that the program will resume soon.

Solid Organ Exchange

In Milano, at this year’s congress of the European Society for Organ Transplantation (ESOT), a partnership to build the first AI and blockchain-powered solid organ exchange was announced.

The partnership is trilateral as it is composed of dHealth Foundation, Paris Transplant Group and the OrganX Foundation—however, it is planned to further expand this partnership which will ultimately greatly benefit patients in need of organ transplants.

OrganX Foundation:

“The exchange is operated on a nonprofit basis and aligns the incentives of all stakeholders along the transplantation continuum by making its processes more effective, efficient, transparent, secured and trustworthy – creating a fully virtualized and tokenized transplant ecosystem with trust at its core.”

The goal of this partnership is to optimize the matching between donor organs and the potential recipients—which will ultimately result in the improvement of the survival time of both the implants and the patients.

dHealth Foundation:

“The dHealth Foundation is proud to be part of this partnership. Many years people were just talking about applying blockchain technology in the context of organ transplant allocation, but finally we are going to make it happen.”

Conclusion

The dHealth technology will not only enable patients to earn for provision of critical data, and provide researchers with the necessary data to create better treatments and cures—but it will also incentivize individuals for healthier behaviour.

A good example of incentivizing individuals to adopt a healthier lifestyle is: assisting individuals to quit smoking or lose weight—with the help of a positive feedback loop based on provision of DHP tokens for successfully completing health-related achievements.

The main tool that the dHealth Foundation will use, aside from its blockchain technology—is the dHealth Wallet which includes plugins that allow for most use-cases to be implemented easily.  Third-party Apps such as the Centiva App that is currently used in most of the projects that already are, or will be, rolled out by the dHealth Foundation—can interact with the dHealth blockchain via APIs. 

Some use cases of the app are:

– Rare disease patient registry

– Collection of population health data

– Rewarding individuals for sharing their data

– Treatment monitoring & generating real-world data

– Case-specific consent provision to use existing data and compensation for said data usage

– Treatment adherence and prevention programs

– Tracking

There are many other utilities that the dHealth blockchain can provide, such as tracking the healthcare supply-chain—which can supercharge the healthcare industry and make all our lives better, because after all—everyone gets sick at some point in their life.

dHealth technology supporters can expect more projects to be rolled out in the near future, which is why it would be wise to keep an eye on their Social Media channels!

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