Relentless Health Value

Today, I speak with Cyrus Maaghul about what the blockchain user experience looks like if I’m a patient, or a provider, or a payer, or a lab. We also discuss how blockchain can uplevel care while reducing cost, delays, and fraud. It matters for transactions like prior authorizations, for example. Here’s one thing I figured out during this conversation: In blockchain speak, “sending a coin” or “token” is pretty much a synonym for “placing an order.”

Cyrus Maaghul is a serial entrepreneur currently applying distributed systems, blockchain, and cryptocurrency technology to the health care industry as founder and CEO of HealthCombix and Co-founder/Board Member at PointNurse. Cyrus’ health care blockchain thought-leadership has appeared in articles on CoinDesk, Nasdaq, Distributed, and other media outlets. His experience as a payments technology entrepreneur and working inside world-class organizations like Fidelity Investments’ Blockchain Incubator and Deloitte Consulting give him a unique perspective to advise, develop strategy, and build decentralized networks. HealthCombix is currently developing new foundational infrastructure and custom applications for decentralized health care, including identity, consent, privacy, smart health trusts, governance, and asset management capabilities. PointNurse is a digital decentralized autonomous-based peer-to-peer virtual health platform seeking to drive down the cost of primary care, streamline clinical trials, and nursing by displacing various intermediaries. Cyrus’ interest in blockchain technology began in 2013 after investing in Bitcoin. This led to his investigating how to use blockchain to solve problems related to privacy, peer-to-peer data sharing, security, administration costs, and virtual community governance.

00:00 The most misunderstood aspect of blockchain.
05:30 Achieving scale within blockchain.
07:50 Solving a specific use-case with blockchain.
09:45 The 6 benefits of blockchain in health care.
10:00 Reducing the complexity of health care with blockchain.
10:25 Creating a single blockchain system for health care, and what that would look like.
13:05 Streamlining a prior-authorization system.
15:15 “In the real world, you won’t know if blockchain is happening.”
18:30 How providers can view their patients’ health files and add to them via blockchain.
20:00 How this blockchain EHR system could then become integrated within provider systems.
21:00 “Sometimes technology is the easy part.”
22:00 How robust patient health records (PHRs) will be if government mandated.
25:00 “Public health departments can really benefit from these systems because they can monitor in a much more real-time way.”
27:50 Cyrus’s advice for an executive at a payer or provider organization about blockchain.
30:40 HealthCombix and what it is.
32:20 You can learn more at healthcombix.com.