Our Dream

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The state of healthcare systems in West Africa is not up to the same level as in the rest of the world. West African countries have long looked towards Western models to provide direction for developments of key sectors to improve the lives of their citizens. It has become apparent that looking towards the West for creating sustainable and effective healthcare systems is untenable.

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There can be a different path to take, and those who take it look at the current reality and reflect on what can be.

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Our idea is based on three simple beliefs:

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1) Patients should have as a right the ability to provide medical records to their practitioners

2) Medical practitioners, as caretakers of their patient's well-being, should also possess the ability to control who gains access to their patient's data

3) Governments and other centralized entities do not have the right to come between patients and doctors to influence them to modify their behavior when it comes to the use and distribution of medical records

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Our belief that medical practitioners have the right to control who can and cannot access the medical records of their patients is nothing new. In fact, this concept that physicians only communicate what is necessary about a patient's health goes back to Hippocrates, the father of Western Medicine. Here is an excerpt from the Hippocratic Oath:

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"Whatever, in connection with my professional service,... I see or hear, in the life of men, which ought not to be spoken of abroad, I will not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret."

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Obviously, there are enormous benefits of allowing third parties to gain access to data sets containing medical records. When governments put in place an initiative to combat malaria or tuberculosis, they can monitor in nearly real-time the number of patients seeking treatment. Research organizations can study the data to discern trends that could influence thinking about global health. Insurance companies could learn from the data to build leaner models that could be made for the cash-poor.

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However, some third parties could use this data in ways that may not eventually provide benefit to the patients. Politicians could use the data to produce news articles vilifying certain populations due to the presence of certain maladies such as AIDS. A large single insurance company may partner with a central EHR database operator and place restrictions to not allow for medical data to be shared to competing companies in order to maintain a higher profit margin.

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The question of how a society can both simultaneously allow for good actors to have access to this data, while restricting access to potential bad actors, is a very challenging one indeed. With centralized models, there is a weak point in the form of a single entity or a single person, who may be corrupted, possess weak morale, or be ill-informed and make an erroneous decision. This is why blockEHR approaches the challenge by putting power back into the medical practitioner's hands.

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How the system can be supported

 

Any company and any system needs value to be derived somewhere from outside sources in order to remain financially sustainable. blockEHR aims to provide the use of the platform for free to all clinics and hospitals. This desire is driven by a fundamental belief that, without this, adoption of the platform will remain abysmally low in rural areas for decades to come.

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To derive value to support the system, third parties will be enabled to inject value into the system in exchange for access to the data.

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