Don Tapscott
Alex Tapscott
Five Ways Blockchain Tech Can Help Us During This Pandemic
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Don and Alex Tapscott are the co-authors of Blockchain Revolution and co-founders of the Blockchain Research Institute. Alex’s new book is Financial Services Revolution. Together they wrote the report Blockchain Solutions in Pandemics.
This is one of those rare turning points in history. The COVID-19 pandemic will profoundly change our behavior and society. Many institutions will come under scrutiny and, we hope, change for the better.
At the Blockchain Research Institute, we’re doing our part to facilitate positive change. Technologies like artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, augmented/virtual reality, and above all, blockchain are more relevant than ever – not just to business and the economy but to the future of public health and the safety of global populations.
Traditional systems have failed us and it’s time for a new paradigm. To build on Victor Hugo, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea that has become a necessity.”
Health care crises and blockchain: A framework
Given the urgent need for global solutions, the Blockchain Research Institute convened a virtual roundtable of 30 experts from five continents. We discussed the challenges of COVID-19 and the possibilities of using blockchain in areas of need. In our special report, “Blockchain Solutions in Pandemics,” we developed a framework for facing pandemics together in these five areas.
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1. Self-sovereign identity, health records and shared data
Data is the most important asset in fighting pandemics. If any useful data exists now, it sits in institutional silos. We need better access to the data of entire populations and a speedy consent-based data sharing system. To accelerate discovery, the blockchain startup Shivom is working on a global project to collect and share virus host data in response to a call for action from the European Union’s Innovative Medicines Initiative. In Honduras, Civitas – an app developed by the start-up Emerge – is linking Hondurans’ government-issued ID numbers with blockchain records used to track medical appointments. Doctors simply scan the app to review a patient’s symptoms verified and recorded by telemedicine services.
Dr. Raphael Yahalom of MIT and the Oxford-Hainan Research Institute is working on Trustup, a trust-reasoning framework that can systematically highlight the ways in which health data recorded on a blockchain ledger is more trustworthy than data stored in conventional databases. The trade-off between privacy and public safety need not be so stark. Through self-sovereign identities, where individuals own their health records and can freely volunteer it to researchers, we can achieve both.
2. Just-in-time supply chain solutions
Supply chains are critical infrastructure for our globally connected economy, and COVID-19 has put them under tremendous strain, exposing potential weaknesses in their design. We must rebuild supply chains to be transparent, where users can access information quickly and trust that it’s accurate. The start-up RemediChain is doing just that for the pharmaceutical supply. One of its co-founders, Dr. Philip Baker, was interested in tracking down and recycling unused but still efficacious medications such as those used for cancer. He saw blockchain as means of recovering their chain of custody:
By posting the medication and its expiration date, people all over the country can create a decentralized national inventory of surplus medication. When there is [a] sudden run on a previously ubiquitous medication like hydroxychloroquine, healthcare professionals can call on this surplus as a life-saving resource. The same principle applies for ventilators and PPE.
Blockchain serves as a “state machine” that gives us visibility into the state of our suppliers as well as the assets themselves. When COVID-19 hit, the start-up VeriTX – a virtual marketplace for digital assets like patented design files – pivoted to medical supplies, so that medical facilities could print the parts needed at one of the 180 3D printing facilities in VeriTX’s network. VeriTX can reverse-engineer a part and then build it much faster and at a lower cost than getting it from the original manufacturer or replacing the equipment.
3. Sustaining the economy: How blockchain can help
Tuesday, November 3, 2020