MedChain Blockchain Healthcare Project and IBM Business Partner Cognition Foundry Team Up

MedChain Pushes Along Blockchain Progress by Collaborating with Cognition Foundry for their IBM Technology

MedChain is fairly new to the blockchain industry, but the mission of this startup is to help with the creation of a globally compliant ledger that will store medical records for more cohesive treatment. Recently, the company announced that they would be joining the efforts of Cognition Foundry to help with their data protection and performance. Cognition Foundry is already partnered with IBM and brings their mainframe technology to the table to help.

The combination of blockchain with the IBM server will help to eliminate some of the challenges that the healthcare industry deals with constantly – the accurate flow of patient information. When a patient goes to a doctor’s office, it is up to that office to gain access to all of the medical files of the patient, based on the compliance of other facilities.

The use of blockchain eliminates the confusion and frustration of missing medical files and gives the patient control over the information instead. Then, they can grant access to the facilities that they visit, based on the blockchain solution for EMR and electronic protected health information (ePHI).

This entire network thrives on the use of Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain, which is designed to specifically run on the LinuxONE platform. With this layered ledger, companies can create their own healthcare dApps.

Most of the inclusion of Cognition Foundry appears to be due to their ability to “democratized access to enterprise IT,” though the other available features are more technologically advanced that what government agencies and corporations presently have.

Steve Wishstart, the CTO of MedChain, released a statement about the partnership, saying:

“Incorporating Cognition Foundry’s IBM LinuxONE environment into the MedChain architecture, allows a fantastic opportunity to exponentially grow Phase II of our network on top of the Phase I work of storing and managing EMR. Phase II is the data-intensive AI and deep learning involved with analyzing all that data. Building on top of the existing MedChain permission structure, only the patient can authorize their data to be used in research. Over the years, this opt-in process will yield petabytes of full lifetimes of contiguous data. The effect of having each patient’s data accessible by all care providers means new discoveries can be made, based on the ‘holistic’ view of each and every procedure or medication taken.”