Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) which is ranked amongst the top five hospitals in the United States has collaborated with Korean blockchain startup MediBloc as they explore ways to improve the storage of patient data and how it is being shared.

MGH expanding its research areas

The director of the Laboratory of Medical Imaging and Computation, a joint venture of MGH and Harvard Medical School, Synho Do, during an interview with CoinDesk stated that the hospital is making plans to expand its research base to include other areas such as medical image analysis, health information exchange and many more. The hospital is turning to new technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to help them achieve that.

Talking about the hospital and its partnership with the crypto startup, Do stated that: “In collaboration with Medibloc, we aim to explore potentials of blockchain technology to provide secure solutions for health information exchange, integrate healthcare AI applications into the day-to-day clinical workflow, and support data sharing and labeling platform for machine learning model development.”

Patient data is something that is needed by several bodies such as hospitals, research bodies, insurance and pharmaceutical companies, with the information obtained enabling them to deliver the kind of medical help that patients need. However, most of these entities keep their own data and sharing them securely is something that has presented challenges over the years.

Allen Wookyun Kho, MediBloc’s founder, and CEO commented that “Every day, when people go to hospitals, lots of information is created, but it’s difficult to transfer it from one hospital to another.”

Kho further added that his company isn’t only working on a distributed ledger that will support storing and sharing medical data, a tool is being developed that would make it easier for data help by hospitals to be converted from the existing formats to a more universal one.

This latest development is great news for the blockchain industry. Over the past few months, blockchain startups have been working on enabling fast and secure transmission of healthcare data. However, securing partnership with major hospitals such as this one is very rare.

Kamran Khan, CEO of blockchain startup Translo revealed that this type of partnership is rare due to the fact that for hospitals to share their data, they will require full access to it from IT vendors designing data systems for them. However, the IT vendors aren’t particularly happy about letting this information get out of the silos they designed, hence hospitals usually have different electronic healthcare systems with different codes. Even within one hospital, there is a tendency to have several systems for different kind of diseases.

Khan further added that: “Even in Boston, there are 27 different systems for only 17 hospitals, and they lack interoperability. This is done on purpose: once the data is out of the siloed system, the hospital can create their own system.”

Thus, for this reason, the hospital has to persuade its IT vendor to provide full access to the data in the existing one. The hospital also has to be sure that the new system will be of benefit to the institution.

MediBloc becoming big in Asia

Even though the company is just starting to penetrate the North American market, it already has clients all over Asia. It has recorded notable success in the region, with Kho revealing that they have partnered with eight medical institutions across the region and 14 tech companies, with Deloitte Anjin LLC, Deloitte’s Korean branch one of their partners.

The business development manager for MediBloc, Dawn Lee also told CoinDesk that the startup has been able to grab the attention of the South Korean government as it is one of the first blockchain companies in the country to run an ICO late last year. The founders, Kho, and Eunsol Lee are both doctors and their reputation played a role in fostering a relationship with government officials and actual hospitals.

Lee revealed that the company was also chosen to provide blockchain technology for government-funded projects, with Bundang Seoul National University and Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital. She further added that the company’s reputation of working with big medical institutions in Asia played a role in convincing the Laboratory of Medical Imaging and Computation to partner with them.

She stated that “The MGH Lab came across our company, we started talking in early spring, signed a deal in summer and we’ve just started the research.” MediBloc has now turned its attention to the development of an ecosystem that would make it easier for other startups to build apps that can be used in various ways to exchange data health.

MediBloc Network to go live before the end of the year

A trial version of the blockchain was launched back in August and the mainnet is expected to go live before the end of the year. It would be fully functional in the second quarter of next year, Kho noted. The blockchain being developed will utilize the delegated proof of stake consensus method, with 10 nodes currently being used. With the mainnet, the number of nodes will become 21, Kho added.

MediBloc is also working on some apps that will be launched in the first half of next year. One of the apps is currently in a beta testing phase and has already recorded 300 users. The app was developed to enable patients to sell information about their symptoms and the prescriptions they received. When MediBloc purchases that information, they will analyze them and sell their analysis to pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

Kho pointed out that the company is working on allowing patients to sell or share their data directly to the buyers without MediBloc having to serve as the middleman. For MediBloc, the primary objective of this move is to ensure that patients can independently decide what to do with their information. Lee finally stated that “We make patients the mediums of their own data.”