In this digital age where data is valuable, healthcare seems to lag behind other industries. Healthcare data platform EHR Data is looking to change this scenario with its vision of creating a global patient record that will give people control over their healthcare data.
EHR Data’s President Steve Lawrence joined CoinGeek Backstage host Nidhi Arora on the sidelines of the CoinGeek New York conference, where they discussed the company’s vision and how the EHR Data uses BSV blockchain to incentivize the healthcare industry.
Lawrence has been in healthcare all his life. From overseeing the pharmacy software company that he and his brother started years ago, Lawrence went on to work at Cardinal Health until he was tapped to help make EHR Data’s vision of a global patient record into reality.
“Our founder at EHR Data recruited me about a year ago to try to turn his vision into some reality. His vision was to create a global patient record. We’re a spin-off of his main company that was in healthcare for 40 years. We’ve got some great healthcare developers. We’re going to make his dream come true and create a global patient record.” explained Lawrence.
The real challenge in healthcare, according to Lawrence, is that consumers don’t own their data. EHR Data’s goal is to help people take back ownership of their healthcare data, and his team found that BSV blockchain is a critical component since they couldn’t write an enormous amount of data to any blockchains.
“The BSV blockchain is critical because of the size of healthcare data. I tell a lot of people that just last year, there were 6 billion scripts written in the United States alone. And so, if you think about collecting healthcare data and trying to write that to a blockchain, you couldn’t write that kind of data to any blockchain but BSV with its scalability and low fees. That’s the critical piece, the scalability, low fees, the immutability of [BSV Blockchain],” he said.
Has the pandemic made it more challenging for EHR Data to address these problems? Instead of giving more challenges, Lawrence said the pandemic helped bring the issue to light. “People understand that they really don’t have the data they need. I mean, you see it here in New York. If you don’t have your vaccine card, you can’t go into the building. You may have already had a shot, but you need proof of it. So being able to have that and not just have your physicians and your pharmacists have it is critical. So it actually helped open people’s eyes, and I think it’ll make our path a lot easier,” he said.
At the moment, EHR Data is working on its mobile app, which Lawrence expects to be out in the market in the near future.
“At CoinGeek Zurich we had just become a company. [Now] we have a very sophisticated clinical rules engine, and we have a mobile app for the patient. So we had to lay down a lot of code between Zurich and now. We’re about a month or two from commercialization, so we’re really excited. Hopefully, by the next CoinGeek [Conference] in March, we’ll have it out in the market, have some clients, and testimonials,” he said.
In closing, Lawrence reminded the viewers that every person should have their own data as a patient and consumer of healthcare.
“I would say that as a consumer of healthcare, every person here, every person watching, really needs to understand that they need to own their data. Right now, you can ask your physician for it, and they’ll give you a big stack of papers that does you no good. So we’re enabling you to get your data digitally and keep it and hopefully, someday, be able to monetize it. So I would like to ask people to keep us in mind. Keep thinking about the ownership of data and someday we’ll come to them with an app where they can have control of it, ” Lawrence said.
Watch: CoinGeek New York panel, Health Care, Life Sciences & Blockchain
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