NurseToken is a project that aims to build a decentralized credentialing, incentive, and payment ecosystem for medical nurses by utilizing the private XERU, and public NEO and Ontology blockchains. It has announced a partnership with its sister project, Snapnurse, an automated nurse-hospital hiring platform, released its white paper, and begun its public pre-sale. The NurseToken crowdsale begins on September 1st, 2018.

NurseToken cites a global shortage of nurses, and states that healthcare organizations worldwide paid USD$4.8 billion for travelling nurse staffing in 2017. Within the United States, it claims that 66 percent of United States hospitals suffer staffing shortages, and that demand for nursing from an aging population will create 1,000,000 openings for registered nurses by 2024.

The NurseToken team cites several factors which have led to a critical employee shortage. These include the following: a difficult and labor-intensive process in establishing a nurse’s credentials and trustworthiness with a new employer, an aging workforce of nurses under heavy pressure to work long hours from employers, and an inefficient supply mechanism that struggles to employ and reimburse qualified nurses across national borders.

Decentralized Nurse Credentialing

The vision of NurseToken is to use blockchain to create a universal, trusted credentialing process that can be utilized by hospitals worldwide. Credentialing information will be encrypted and stored on the XERU private blockchain, and may include any necessary documents to enable hiring, such as: the nurse’s health record, examination record, and digital ID. NurseToken also envisions increasing the trustworthiness of the documents through third-party verification. The private XERU blockchain will connect to the Ontology MainNet to enable payment and access. XERU is a private blockchain developed by NurseToken CTO, Josef Jonas.

A public profile containing general data about the nurse will be accessible to prospective employers. Institutions will be able to view the various types of credentialing data available for a prospective employee, and the date it was updated before purchasing access. The Ontology blockchain will handle a payment protocol granting access to download the nurse’s complete data set from the private XERU blockchain. Payments made in NurseToken will be awarded a discount to encourage its use by medical institutions.

Other use cases for NurseToken include an incentive and rewards system to encourage employee retention, and a payment system for nurses working abroad to quickly send value across borders with minimal fees.

The team also wishes to expand into other credentialed professions such as policing and education as their platform matures.

NurseToken

The NurseToken itself will exist as an NEP-5 token on the NEO blockchain to facilitate easier listing on cryptocurrency exchanges that already support the standard. 50 percent of the total 300,000,000 supply will be offered in the crowdsale at a price of $0.16 USD each, before bonuses. 20 percent of the total supply is delegated for the team, 25 percent is earmarked to incentivize future ecosystem and institutional partners, and 5 percent of tokens have been allocated for early investors. The fundraising hard cap is USD$17.5 million, with a USD$2 million soft cap below which contributors will be refunded.

More information on NurseToken is available at the below links.