An Introduction

Steve Wishstar. Engineer by name, and worldly traveler by heart. Whether it’s crabbing in Alaska, fishing the Colorado, or flying across the world, Steve is exploring the world. Still, his laptop is never far from reach.

MedChain is very excited to introduce Steve Wishstar as our Chief Technology Officer. Steve has over ten years of CTO experience and forty years working software projects with world-leading organizations such as NASA, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and the University of Colorado. His expertise as an executive manager, program manager, and software engineer makes him a perfect fit to lead the blockchain team. He has a demonstrated history of developing/implementing corporate strategic roadmaps and directing Technical Teams to produce maintainable code, automated test driven architectures, and solid full-stack integrity. With Steve as our CTO, MedChain will be building a HIPAA and GDPR compliant blockchain like no other.

His role at MedChain is to effectively hold, develop, articulate, and continually evolve the company’s strategic technical strategy. Healthcare is a dynamically-evolving, highly-competitive space and Steve wants to make sure MedChain continues to have the best technology offering. He is striving to ensure that the company’s business strategy stays aligned with its technology strategy. In this capacity, Steve wants to excite people about the long-term vision of using blockchain technology, AI, and other cutting-edge innovations.

Why MedChain?

Talking to Steve, you can hear that he was thrilled to join MedChain because he feels that MedChain’s approach to entering the healthcare industry is not only sound but captures the essence of what blockchain technology is poised to revolutionize. MedChain uses blockchain as a common-data layer where no company owns your data. It is you, the patient, that controls and maintains your data. The MedChain architecture creates this common-data layer where the patient is the only one that can unlock their data. This distributed storage network is not owned by any one entity and is accessible by everyone in the healthcare field. This means you, as a patient, can authorize anyone in the world to view that data, and consequently, this network forms the basis for all medical interactions throughout the industry. MedChain will be the foundation upon which a new healthcare system will emerge, and Steve wants to be the one leading that charge.

When Steve is not hard at work behind his laptop, he is enjoying all the wonders and experiences of living a full life with his beautiful wife Vanessa and raising his 3-year-old son and new daughter (Dec 2018). For instance, every year, his family visits a remote cabin in Alaska for fishing, hiking, log cabin building, and gardening. It’s a wonderful opportunity to unplug and return to the homesteading way of life.

Where is Blockchain Heading?

He is thrilled about blockchain technology because of the secure, transparent and self-regulating nature of the systems we can build with it. For instance, within MedChain, we have a distributed storage network. This DSN is a consortium of organizations that all provide secure file storage. These organizations can be within a hospital whose system already stores its patients’ data, or a cloud-based storage entity, or future businesses. Each organization offering storage space has unique strengths and individual pricing. MedChain has a built-in, automated Storage Market that handles all the pricing, storage options, payment transfers, encryption, distribution, fragmentation, and tracking any and all accesses to the data. This Storage Market is “hands-off” and will run itself. Of course, if laws in various countries change, the MedChain tech team, led by Steve himself, can step in to modify the appropriate rules for storage, but all of these rules are entirely transparent, and any provider or patient can track the changes as they occur. With this transparency in place, it removes any uncertainties and instills trust in the system! It also ensures the lowest costs for fully compliant, EMR storage.

Storing medical records today is an old and archaic system. The healthcare industry is so mired down in incremental improvements to the status-quo of securing medical records, that they have not been vigilant in reacting to how technology is changing. The very nemesis they are defending against is innovating every day. They are completely changing their approach and technology stack every day to advance their “(illegal) business strategy.” Our technology needs to be equally nimble. Carving out a new road, picking the “vehicle” up and placing it on that road, and using the steering wheel is required to get us out of the rut that medical record storage is currently trapped within.

We are in the second age of the Internet. The first age was that all data and applications running on the Web were owned by individual companies (e.g., AOL and CompuServe). The current second age split the applications away from the data, and while corporations still own your data, you have the freedom to find or create different applications to use it. The third age will be ushered in with blockchain.

Here at MedChain, we are excited to have Steve from the start to help build this into something extraordinary. If you want to see Steve in action out in Alaska, don’t worry. It’s only a 4-hour ferry trip from Juneau, then a 45-minute drive to the river, and a 20-minute boat ride up the river to the lake!