At Hearthy.co we decided to put open source at the core of our project. One of the reasons we did it, besides our will to empower the patient, is because we don’t have any incentives to capture the data against the patient’s will.

The reasons why there’s so many silos of information in healthcare are mainly :

Traditionally, hospitals and healthcare providers pay for using a specific software to keep electronic health records. But if it was easy to change the software, customers would be able to change it at the end of the contract if they’re not pleased with the product. However, the law (in France at least) forces software editors to make data “exportable” but it doesn’t say in which format it has to be done. Hence, if they decide to export everything in PDF files, they can. But what use would that have for the next software editor? And more importantly, what use would that have for healthcare professionals ?

Another reason are healthcare professionals themselves. As you may know, physicians are hired, or go up in the “scale” inside hospitals, depending on the amount of papers they publish. While writing the articles that they will later publish, although increasing the amount of data obtained would increase the power of the study, sometimes they try to keep the information for themselves. The reason behind this is the power struggle that will come about the position of the author’s name on the final paper, or who publish first in the most prestigious journal. A few days ago the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article about the “publish or perish” endemic mantra in many scientific fields.

Finally we must not forget that doctors with the same information don’t necessarily give the same diagnosis or the same treatments. That’s one of the reasons why medicine is still considered an art, but it’s also why the exchange of information between too many hands would have a negative impact on the outcome of the patient. Although we also know that in certain cases having second medical opinions can improve patients outcomes.

At hearthy.co we don’t follow the same rules. Our goal is to make the patient the real owner of his data and in order to do that we need to make these data available to him and to his medical practitioners. All of them. Whenever the patient wants. Wherever the patient wants. Always.

To guarantee the success of our mission we have to create a system that simultaneously allows the patient to choose who is he going to share his data with, and protects data from hackers or unwanted “viewers”. That’s why the Open Source approach and the Blockchain technology make sense together. The Open Source part makes it easy to other systems to interact the patient’s data meanwhile the Blockchain and smart contracts store efficiently the security preferences of the patient. This makes the system safer but still share-friendly.

If you want to know more about how you manage to store and share the data, please download the whitepaper or come and discuss with us on Slack.

We are looking forward to hear from you.

About the author

Juan Sebastian SUAREZ VALENCIA is a french physician, born in Bogota — Colombia. He is also an entrepreneur in telemedicine with a company in Paris, France and medical advisor at Hearthy. For more information : LinkedIn.