MedChain has recently onboarded a new team member!

Russell Decker is a blockchain developer and medical software enthusiast. He recently graduated from University of Colorado, Boulder where he studied a unique combination of philosophy and computer science.

His motivation for the unusual combination is the belief that ethics and moral programming will become extremely relevant as autonomous systems and Artificial Intelligence play a larger role in society. While attending CU, he has built and contributed to a number of interesting programs and applications ranging from a multithreaded DNS lookup service to an artificially intelligent SIM opponent.

His experience in the healthcare industry began the summer of his sophomore year; He interned at the Center for Ubiquitous Computing(CUbiC), an Arizona State laboratory focused on developing state of the art medical devices. He assisted a team of graduate students on a project called NeroVis which allows paralyzed patients to interface with an IPad via the patient’s gaze. As a junior, he developed software at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN where he continued to work until meeting MedChain at a BlockChain summit in Boulder, CO. At Mayo Clinic, he worked on implementing a novel, model driven system which allows the development of intelligent decision aid applications to be created on the system. While working on the project, he created a library for Angular2 applications to interface with FHIR endpoints, contributing to the effort for interoperability in healthcare applications.

Since his first day on Monday, he has built a dockerized Secure Medical Record Chain prototype using hyperledger-fabric. The SMRC is the blockchain which will authorize access to the distributed medical record database as well as maintain a distributed ledger of who has accessed the records. It is a small local network consisting of an Orderer Organization and two peer Organizations each with two peers. Currently the network is exchanging integers via chaincode inserted from the command line where the integers represent locations of medical records. He has also created a permissioned IPFS network which will eventually serve as the distributed file system which will store the medical records. He has also been working with Steve Wishstar(CTO) on the encryption and security aspects of the network. He’s excited about this project and looks forward to applying his skills at MedChain.

And this is all in just the first week! Check out our code here and see for yourself.