MyMedicalFiles

A unified way to secure access,control and sharing of health-related information

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Inspiration

Our aim is to create a solution towards a holistic approach on health-related information, easy access and secure , transparent data sharing across systems. A Connected Healthcare Experience that through a private peer-to-peer network would enable secure health-related information exchange for accessing and updating information for all health stakeholders (providers, private payers and governments, social security funds, insurance agencies etc). Fast accessible and available patient information would transform data into clinical knowledge and thus result in improved clinical decision-making and high quality patient-care.

Problem Statement

Under the current medical practice there is insufficient data, insufficient time,context, and access of healthcare professionals. Consumers leave data scattered across various organizations as life events take them away from one provider's data storage and into another. In doing so they lose easy access to medical history , as the provider, not the patient, generally retains primary stewardship. Since consumers do not have actual ownership of their data they lack holistic knowledge, up-to-date information and access to their own data, with insights attached wherever, and however is most convenient for them.

For instance, when patients switch insurance plans or healthcare providers, most medical practices rely on patients’ self-reporting to reconstruct their records. As a result, not all the information is available or transferred properly causing insufficient information, inaccurate insights,erroneous medical reports that lead to medical malpractices.

There are strong examples worldwide that pinpoint the cost in lives, money and time.

  • Medical errors → 1 in 300 people worldwide are exposed at risk of death due to medical errors that could be prevented. More recent data from a developed country that invests in healthcare (US) show that malpractices is the 3rd leading cause of death with more than 250.000 deaths/year and the annual cost is estimated between 4,5- 21,8 billion (WHO,2019; Anderson & Abrahamson, 2017)
  • Increasing health costs for health providers → is estimated that there will be an annual increase by an average 5% each year in Europe
  • Increasing costs for research and development in the pharmaceutical sector → between 2010- 2016 the average cost of importing a drug into the market was increased by 33%
  • Traditionally viewed as a fragmented industry with hyperlocal challenges and solutions, healthcare needs to quickly adapt to rapid digitisation forces, increasing demands and expectations from informed and connected consumers finding the resources to fuel innovation and build infrastructure.
  • Incapability of health systems to prevent and cover the rise of chronic diseases → cancer is expected to increase by 23% until 2040 and diabetes by 16%, making prevention and medical coverage a priority (Deloitte, 2020).
  • Systems’ incapability to handle health crisis/ epidemics outbreaks

In addition, healthcare data comes from many sources in a variety of formats. Currently, there’s no single system or technology infrastructure to retrieve, store, and analyze data from various sources at scale.

SOLUTION

Healthcare Providers

MyMedicalFiles aims to become an integrator, a centralized (“one-stop shop”) location for connected healthcare services and supportive services in addition to primary care. Our vision is to become an mHealth enabler, improving the lives of people around the world, maximizing the potential of technical advancements (e.g creating virtual capacity) and lowering the financial burden of healthcare. As an integrator of a wide range of health services, our solution will target to improve consumer experience and provide them with great value through innovative, fast, secure and personalized customer service. Through innovation and digital transformation, technology MyMedicalFiles will enable virtual care, erasing healthcare boundaries applying it anywhere. We have envisioned a connected environment with interoperability solutions that facilitates organizations to seamlessly leverage their technology investments. These solutions would provide healthcare professionals with fast accessible, consolidated patient information supporting better decision making by transforming data into clinical knowledge and thus resulting in high quality patient- care.

Individuals

All persons will have comprehensive, immutable log and easy access to their medical information across providers and treatment sites. Through our solution, individuals can feel safer, have effective control of their data and keep their health on track. MyMedicalFiles can help them reduce stress, uncertainty, lower their costs and make better financial decisions around health. Consumers can be more aware of the functions of their body, make better arrangements and avoid future implications through preventive care. Greater patient involvement can reduce the burden of harm by up to 15%, saving billions of dollars each year– a very good return on investment (WHO, 2019).

Society

We make our business about helping others. One of the main targets is to tackle the social and behavioural determinants of health. MyMedicalFiles will help people strengthen their collective will and engage them with various societies. The provision of secure, reliable data will also help to reassure and restore communities’ trust in their health care systems. Society will be ready to confront any pandemic or health crisis with more accurate data and tools and more responsible individuals for their own Health.

How we build it

MyMedicalFiles Digital Cloud based Integration Platform will be built upon distributed ledger technology and open APIs in order to connect with both legacy and state-of-the-art technologies. Our APIs will be developed according to industry standards ensuring security and stability such as data encryption as it travels to the back-end and token-based authentication enforcement. The scalable and secure distributed ledger platform will use strong electronic identification and authentication mechanisms (such as eIDAS) ensuring a high level of trust for transactions to go smoothly in a reliable, secure and accessible manner. Furthermore, transactional relationships will remain private and not visible across parties while sharing hashes as transaction evidence on the ledger. Private data can be shared among “collection” members (e.g hospitalization data between public hospitals), or with a specific organization on a need-to-know basis (source:link )

Back-end and API architecture

In this very early architecture design we are deploying a cloud computing infrastructure well suited to running the same backend services in multiple datacenters around the world thus creating “local” endpoints around the globe to avoid latency issues. With cloud services we can support agile development and operations capable of introducing new versions of apps and backend services rapidly but also provide monitoring to validate operational quality. Through cloud we are going to ensure high availability by eliminating single points of failure, reliable crossover and fast failure detection. According to the final deployment, different URI/Restful-endpoints will manage clusters, server nodes, buckets and cross datacenter replication, also used to retrieve run-time statistics

Figure 1: A high-level architecture of mobile cloud solution

For the MVP testing in order to proceed in fast implementation will use the following known technologies:

  • For Back-end : Java,Tomcat,JWT Tokens,Spring security,Spring,Redis
  • For the mobile application : Android Studio The cloud infrastructure will be hosted in Amazon web services

Databases

Our architecture will combine relational and non-relational (NoSQL) database systems in order to store, recover, query and persist standardized medical information whether data is in the form of ISO/EN 13606 normalized Electronic Health Record XML extracts, both in isolation and concurrently or not. Relational Databases applied to build the persistence layer of a standardized medical information system will be used to interconnect with multiple 3rd party informational systems. Non-relational NoSQL databases (eg. document-based and/or native XML) will be used for high database sizes (secondary use, research applications) and avoid extracting XML files into BLOBs causing complex data retrieval logic, thereby damaging complex queries.

Security

Security is a major concern that we will address following Principles and baseline security requirements: Security by design, Security by default, Security through the lifecycle, Verifiable security, Least privilege, High level authentication, data integrity,non-repudiation and availability, data confidentiality, data ownership, data usage restriction. Conformance to law and frameworks such as GDPR, HIPPA is equality important as security.

Healthcare applications and services need to be available 24/7. We will assure five-nines availability with built-in high availability and includes powerful cross datacenter replication (XDCR) capabilities to support disaster recovery and data locality requirements with full control over the topology – unidirectional or bidirectional.

What we have done during the weekend

  • we were provided the opportunity to learn new things and skills through the organised webinars
  • coordinated the roles amongst the team
  • received very good feedback on the business value of our idea from other teams and Mentors
  • contacted many Mentors from different fields and implemented their suggestions to our concept
  • got valuable technical details about developing the best back-end solution regarding cost and time for such a big implementation
  • clarified details of blockchain technology integration to our solution

Immediate Effects - Solutions to Coronavirus crisis

  • Virtual capacity. We will eliminate the need for regular hospital rooms by performing exquisite monitoring in the patient’s home using sensors and AI algorithms. This would not reduce the need for intensive care units for critically ill patients, or operating rooms and emergency rooms, but the rest of the hospital could essentially be out-migrated to patient bedrooms at far more convenience and less cost than our current model relying on our very expensive facilities. Additionally, hospital decongestion will lead in protecting frontline medical staff and preventing professional burnout.

  • Vulnerable groups prioritization. Through data exchange, health facilities will be given the opportunity to recognize individuals that belong to vulnerable groups (chronic diseases, elderly etc.) and give them priority in health care. Easy and immediate access to medical records, drug allergies, medication, prior hospitalization/ surgeries and doctors’ reports will be time and life- saving.

  • Social complacency. Stress relief and mental balance can be achieved through the use of a coronavirus hotline in which mental health professionals will provide psychological support. Moreover, information and answers on virus-related topics will be provided through a chatbot, thus reducing the anxiety caused by isolation and ignorance. Stigma affects the emotional and mental health of stigmatized groups and the communities they live in and can lead to social avoidance/ racism, denials of health care, education, housing, employment and physical violence. By creating awareness in the society and by stopping stigma, we will make communities resilient and will help combat coronavirus faster and on a global level.

Impact (after crisis)

Mymedicalfiles aims to form meaningful long-term, trusting primary care relationships by achieving everyone’s Engagement in Health Innovation promoting productivity and effectiveness of current complex health and social services system. Every healthcare stakeholder will be looking to shift their focus to clinical outcomes, value, and patient satisfaction in the same way. We want to create collaborations within the public sector, the private sector, individuals and societies and help transform healthcare financing and delivery. Concerning the medical and pharmaceutical research, we enable the emergence of data economics, supplying big data to empower researchers while engaging patients and providers in the choice to release metadata. Promoting prevention and awareness is an investment in improving patient’s safety that can lead to significant financial savings and more importantly better clinical image. This is because the cost of prevention is typically much lower than the cost of treatment due to harm, especially when it comes to chronic diseases.

Challenges we ran into

  • We can get consumers to use the apps, but how do we get the combination of doctor and the health system or practice setting to change how they are doing things?
  • More challenges to overcome include questions of how can we help healthcare professionals to make better diagnosis and write appropriate prescriptions and how can we fill gaps between consumer expectations and the current medical infrastructure?
  • The major challenge is data unification . Integration and collaboration with 3rd party systems
  • Inspire partnership innovations that cut through conventional thinking

Core Team Members

  • Maria-Anna Tassi - Sociologist- Psychologist
  • Semina Markopoulou - Operations Manager
  • Michalis Tsangidis - Business Analyst
  • Vaggelis Emmanouil - Software Engineer,Database Admin
  • Evangelos Markopoulos - IT Project Manager, ERP/IS Security & Digital Transformation Consultant. Certified DPO (GDPR).

Our team has important experience across various business domains and industries from aerospace to retail. We love and favour diversity , innovative ways of thinking and fresh ideas.

References

World Health Organization. (2019). 10 Facts on Patient Safety. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/features/factfiles/patient_safety/en/

Anderson, J. G., & Abrahamson, K. (2017). Your Health Care May Kill You: Medical Errors. In ITCH (pp. 13-17).

Deloitte, Hellenic Federation of Enterprises. (2020). Digital Transformation of the Health Sector. Retrieved from https://www2.deloitte.com/gr/en/pages/life-sciences-and-healthcare/articles/Health-4_0.html

Website

mobile application site: link

PitchVideo

2 min youtube video: link

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