Health for coins, not dollars ;) – The “not so serious” Mapping of Healthcare Cryptocurrencies

By SOFIJA DRECUN At this years’ SXSW it was all about blockchain and cryptocurrencies, but it was like that at HIMSS, JPM, CES, etc. as well. Since we wrote already about the first of the two buzzwords – blockchain as a trend in Healthcare, we decided to tackle the idea of cryptocurrencies in healthcare. First, we checked around the office and found out that several devs have been in a couple of Telegram chat rooms as they tried to buy “health coins” in a presale (ICO – initial Coin Offering; Pre-ICO). Will you be buying your next health plan with ethereum? Or is the new health coin going to solve the problem of fragmented healthcare records? The idea behind cryptocurrencies, is to secure financial transactions using strong cryptography, control the creation of additional units (so no more “printing money” or to use a more serious term ”quantitative easing”) and basically allow us to sell a car at a local parking lot at 11 pm to a guy we met online and know the transaction is verified, and the money in our digital wallet. However, will it allow us to have a better and secure payment structure between providers and payers, or a more secure access to our health records, with the option of communicating with multiple data sources from physicians, wearables, apps etc – we are down for that! How do we “print” coins/tokens? Not all currencies are “mineable”. Bitcoin, built on blockchain, has a proof-of-work algorithm, which means that new bi...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Tech Source Type: blogs