The healthcare system is expensive, inefficient and frustrating due to unnecessary third parties and friction filled manual processes that get between patients and their doctors. Through decentralized identityby and credentialing we can create a distributed network of practicing doctors that connect connect securely, directly, privately with each other and with the patients they care for. We are building the future essentialized healthcare revolution and we can’t wait to build it with you.

The annual ConV2X is a leading international health tech symposium driving real world evidence, strategy, research, operations and trends to create a blueprint for a new digital health era. The 2021 symposium featured a scientific program of academic/research presentations in addition to business and industry talks. The research track focused on exploring and sharing developments in blockchain and emerging technologies in health and clinical medicine. Submissions were based on original research, conceptual frameworks, proposed applications, position papers, case studies, and real-world implementation. Selection was based on a peer-review process. Faculty, students, and industry researchers were encouraged to submit abstracts to present ideas before an informed and knowledgeable audience of industry leaders, policy makers, funders, and researchers.

This presentation was selected by the scientific review committee.

Submission Review Committee

• Dave Kochalko, CEO of ARTiFACTS
• Anjum Khurshid, UT Austin
• Carlos Caldas, UT Engineering
• Gil Alterovitz, Harvard Medical School
• Kayo Fujimoto, UT Health Houston
• Lei Zhang, University of Glasglow
• Sean Manion, CSciO of ConsenSys Health
• Vijayakuman Varadarajan, University of South Wales
• Vikram Dhillon, Wayne State University
• Yuichi Ikeda, Kyoto University

There is increasing recognition that health-oriented datasets could be regarded as intangible assets: distinct assets with future economic benefits but without physical properties. While health-oriented datasets—particularly health records—are ascribed monetary value on the black market, there are few established methods for assessing value for legitimate research and business purposes. The emergence of blockchain has created new commerce opportunities for transferring assets without intermediaries. Therefore, blockchain is proposed as a medium by which research datasets could be transacted to provide future value. Blockchain methodologies also offer security, auditability, and transparency to authorized individuals for verifying transactions. The authors will share data valuation methodologies consistent with accounting principles and include discussions of black market valuation of health data. Further, this article describes blockchain-based methods of managing real-time payment/micropayment strategies.

A candid discussion that dives into the recesses of AI and ethics including topics such as what lessons can be used in healthcare from tech players implementing responsible AI and unbiased systems, how can responsible AI help build a clinical support system, examples from providers and payers and learnings from responsible AI which can be used in Obamacare and clinical trial implementation.   

Discussion topics will include:

• What is responsible AI? Is it the same as Ethical AI? 
• What lessons can be used in healthcare from tech players implementing responsible AI and unbiased systems?
• Why is responsible AI important for healthcare? Is there demographic bias in the treatment part of responsible AI?
• How can responsible AI help build a clinical support system? 
• What are some examples of responsible AI in the healthcare industry with respect to providers and payers? 
• What are learnings from responsible AI which can be used in Obamacare implementation?
• HHS introduced an interoperability rule between EMR/EHR systems in 2019. How does it help in the implementation of responsible AI?  
• How responsible AI is currently covered in new US government initiative such as AI.gov
• Responsible AI & data bias in clinical trials 

The annual ConV2X is a leading international health tech symposium driving real world evidence, strategy, research, operations and trends to create a blueprint for a new digital health era. The 2021 symposium featured a scientific program of academic/research presentations in addition to business and industry talks. The research track focused on exploring and sharing developments in blockchain and emerging technologies in health and clinical medicine. Submissions were based on original research, conceptual frameworks, proposed applications, position papers, case studies, and real-world implementation. Selection was based on a peer-review process. Faculty, students, and industry researchers were encouraged to submit abstracts to present ideas before an informed and knowledgeable audience of industry leaders, policy makers, funders, and researchers.

This presentation was selected by the scientific review committee.

Submission Review Committee

• Dave Kochalko, CEO of ARTiFACTS
• Anjum Khurshid, UT Austin
• Carlos Caldas, UT Engineering
• Gil Alterovitz, Harvard Medical School
• Kayo Fujimoto, UT Health Houston
• Lei Zhang, University of Glasglow
• Sean Manion, CSciO of ConsenSys Health
• Vijayakuman Varadarajan, University of South Wales
• Vikram Dhillon, Wayne State University
• Yuichi Ikeda, Kyoto University

The keynote highlights how rising healthcare costs, drivers of waste in the system, and an outdated infrastructure slow innovation and create a poor patient experience.  A modern infrastructure that connects the healthcare ecosystem is needed to deliver data liquidity with security. Modernizing the infrastructure of healthcare empowers innovation in blockchain, AI, DLT, and NLP.

Biography

Stuart Hanson is a lifelong strategist a innovator I healthcare and fintech. From the beginning of his career, Stuart identified unique ways to leverage technology to improve processes and transform consumer experiences. As CEO of Avaneer Health, he leads the team building an inclusive network that solve the problem of interoperability by ensuring all stakeholders have equal ad easy access to patient data when it is needed most. Prior to joining Avaneer, Stuart served as head of healthcare payments and served as a senior healthcare executive at JP Morgan Chase. He led and negotiated the filrm’s largest acquisition in healthcare when acquiring InstaMed in 2019. Previously, Stuart served as general manager of consumer payment solutions at Change Healthcare. Stuart has also served in leadership roles for healthcare solutions at Citi and Fifth Third Bank. He chaired the HIMSS Revenue Cycle Improvement Task Force, focused on creating a vision for the next generation of revenue cycle management tolls and processes to drive administrative cost containment, interoperability and a better consumer experience.

Background: The current healthcare ecosystem in the United States is plagued by inefficiencies in transitions of patient care between healthcare providers due in large part to a lack of interoperability among the many electronic medical record (EMR) systems that exist today. Both providers and patients experience significant frustration due to the negative effects of increased costs, unnecessary administrative burden, and duplication of services that occur because of data fragmentation in the system. Blockchain technology provides a solution to mitigate or eliminate these gaps by allowing for healthcare information exchange that is distributed, auditable, immutable, and respectful of patient autonomy. Our multidisciplinary team identified key tasks required for a transition of care to design and develop a blockchain application, MediLinker, that served as a patient-centric identity management system to address the issues of data fragmentation ultimately allowing for the delivery of high value care.   Methods: The MediLinker application was evaluated for its ability to accomplish various key tasks needed for a successful transition of patient care in an outpatient setting. Our team created twenty unique patient use cases covering a diversity of medical needs and social circumstances that were played out by participants who were asked to perform various tasks as they received case across a simulated healthcare ecosystem composed of four clinics, a research institution, and other ancillary public services. Tasks included, but were not limited to, clinic enrollment, verification of identity, medication reconciliation, sharing insurance and billing information, and updating demographic information. With this iteration of MediLinker, we specifically focused on the functionality of Guardianship and patient revocation of healthcare information. Additionally, throughout the simulation we surveyed participant perceptions regarding the use of MediLinker and blockchain technology to better ascertain comfortability and usability of the application.   Results: Quantitative evaluation of simulation results revealed that MediLinker was able to successfully accomplish all seven clinical scenarios tested across the twenty patient use cases. MediLinker successfully achieved its goal of patient-centered interoperability as participants transitioned their simulated healthcare data, including COVID-19 vaccination status and current medications, across the four clinic sites and research institution. In addition to completing all key tasks designated, all eligible participants were able to enroll with and subsequently revoke data access with our simulated research site. A high degree of data accuracy was noted with most errors occurring due to inaccurate data entry from user input. Our qualitative analysis of user perceptions indicated that comfortability and trust with blockchain technology, such as MediLinker, grew with increased education and exposure to such technology.   Conclusion: The ubiquitous problem of data fragmentation in our current healthcare ecosystem has placed considerable strain on providers and patients alike. Blockchain applications for health identity management, such as MediLinker, provide a viable solution to stem the inefficiencies that exist today. The interoperability that MediLinker provided across our simulated healthcare system has the potential to improve transitions of care by sharing key aspects of healthcare information in a timely, secure, and patent-centric fashion allowing for the delivery of consistent personalized high-value care. Blockchain technologies appear to face similar challenges to widespread adoption as other novel interventions, namely recognition, trust, and usability. Further development and scaling are required for such technology to realize its full potential in the real-world and transform the practice of modern healthcare.

Pharmaceutical supply chains are complex structures including various actors, and blockchains are seen as a promising solution to increase effectiveness and overcome some of the main challenges in these supply chains, especially the lack of trust. However, the European Union has set strict rules in the domain of pharmaceutical supply chains in order to protect patient safety and public health, and using blockchains brings further legal requirements to comply. Among these requirements, personal data protection is of utmost importance because it has been argued, for years, that blockchains and the EU data protection regime are in conflict by their natures. However, it is also claimed that when rightly designed and combined with other technological solutions, blockchains can offer great opportunities to enhance data protection. Nevertheless, blockchains’ potential in pharmaceutical supply chains has not yet been realized as most use cases are in the Proof of Concept or pilot stages.

This paper will examine the debates around blockchains and data protection with the objective of drawing constructive conclusions on whether blockchains solutions can be designed in data protection-enhancing ways and whether this can help realize blockchains’ potential in pharmaceutical supply chains, particularly by creating trust.  For this purpose,  this paper takes the example of an ongoing EU-funded innovative research project called PharmaLedger as a case study to concretize its theoretical examinations. This project is chosen since it gathers together a wide variety of stakeholders representing different interests and aims to create a digital trust ecosystem in healthcare, by providing a widely trusted platform that supports the design and adoption of blockchain-enabled healthcare solutions while accelerating the delivery of innovation that benefits the entire ecosystem from manufacturers to patients.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we witnessed how sharing of biological and biomedical data have facilitated the researchers, medical practitioners and policymakers to tackle the pandemic at a global scale. Despite the growing use of EHR by medical practitioners and wearable digital gadgets by individuals, 80% of the health and medical data remain unused, adding little value to the researchers and medical practitioners. Legislative constraints related to health data sharing, centralised siloed design of traditional data management systems and most importantly, lack of incentivisation models are thought to be the underpinning bottlenecks for sharing health data. With the advent of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the EU and the development of technologies like blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT), it is now possible to create a new paradigm of data sharing by changing the incentivisation model from current authoritative or altruistic form to a shared economic model where financial incentivisation will be the main driver for data sharing. This can be achieved by setting up a digital health data marketplace (DHDM). Here we reviewed papers that proposed technical models or implemented frameworks that use blockchain-like technologies for health data. We seek to understand and compare different technical challenges associated with implementing and optimising the DHDM operation outlined in these papers. We also examined the legal limitations in the context of European Union and other countries such as the USA to accommodate any compliance requirement for such a marketplace. Last but not least, we reviewed papers that investigated the short, medium and long terms socioeconomic impact of such a marketplace on a wide range of stakeholders.