Embleema, a Delaware company, emerged from stealth and launched the public beta of its HIPAA-compliant, personal health records blockchain after one year of research and development, the company said on Tuesday.
PatientTruth is a decentralized application (DApp) and user interface developed by Embleema to allow stakeholders to interact with Embleema’s healthcare blockchain. But more specifically, it is designed for patients and providers to share medical records.
Through PatientTruth, patients can easily integrate all their medical and wellness data on a secured HIPAA compliant record, share these with healthcare stakeholders, and receive compensation for being involved.
Built on Ethereum, the Embleema platform connects patients, life sciences, and regulators, and intends to solve the challenges associated with collection and safe sharing of real world evidence (RWE).
RWE refers to healthcare information collected from multiple sources outside of typical clinical research settings, including electronic medical records (EMRs), claims and billing data, product and disease registries, and data gathered by personal devices and health applications.
RWE plays an important role in decision-making related to authorization and access to new medicines and reimbursement, and are used in critical fields including understanding real world settings such as treatment populations, patterns of care and the burden of disease; assessing the effectiveness of current therapies; refining or supplementing evidence from conventional trials of new medicines; and providing new evidence of relative effectiveness of new medicines.
But current RWE researches suffer from major deficiencies including low-resolution aggregated data sets sold by third party data brokers, the incapacity to secure individual consent, and the inability to monitor the same patient over extended periods of time.
Embleema has set out to solve these issues by allowing patients to consent to real-time data sharing with pharmaceutical companies and healthcare authorities, and be rewarded with cryptocurrency tokens.
Patients have complete control of their data and can manage with whom and to what extent their medical information is being shared. Embleema uses blockchain technology to generate an immutable log verifying who has accessed a patient’s records.
Robert Chu, CEO and founder of Embleema, left his role as senior vice president of global technology solutions at IMS Health, a leading American company providing information, services and technology for the healthcare industry, to found Embleema in June 2017.
“We focus on real data from real patients in the real world, something the health system has struggled with,” Chu said.
“Our mission is to turn the bottle upside down and put patients first, restoring their sovereignty over their data.
“Blockchain removes the need for third parties to broker the sharing of data, while providing the most accurate data possible for precision medicine. This is the best way to guarantee that individual patient data will be used to their benefit.”
Features of the PatientTruth V1 decentralized application include:
- Visualization of medical histories and Fitbit activity data shared by patients;
- Upload Continuity of Care Documents (CCD) medical records into the blockchain, with further support of other HL7 and FHIR interfaces in the future;
- Upload of Fitbit information into the blockchain, with further integration of other connected devices in the future;
- Medical history stored securely on the blockchain;
- Authorization management for the sharing of medical history;
- Audit-trail of personal medical records accesses; and
- Compensation in tokens for uploading CCDs and Fitit information.