Anyone Home? The Push for Decentralized Health Data
Please note: AHT is not a financial product or an investment product. AHT is a high risk project that is currently in beta and you should not treat this as investment advice or opportunity. Please use at your own risk.
This blog is designed to serve as an update to our community who is interested in learning about the tools and technology we are developing on the Bowhead Blockchain. This post will cover:
- Why a decentralized health data system?
- The Bowhead Roadmap
- Bowhead AHT (Anonymous Health Token) Staking & Voting
Why a Decentralized Healthcare System?
Today more than ever people need secure and scalable healthcare systems. In the last few years, we have seen the rise of decentralized clinical trials, controversial vaccine passports and some of the pitfalls of having centralized healthcare systems which may be more open to hackers. We believe in a world where everyone has the best digital health tools regardless of socio-economic standing.
Remote Healthcare is a here to stay
Decentralized Clinical Trials allow for clinical trials to be fully or have a remote component. Decentralized Clinical Trials should not be confused with decentralized data for those clinical trials (the data is still very much centralized).
A few years ago, clinical trials were mostly conducted at physical “sites” where patients, investigators, and researchers would meet in person. The convergence of increased bandwidth, capable mobile devices and software have transformed clinical trials to “decentralized”. This decentralization is well documented, for example in this article “No place like home? Stepping up decentralized clinical trials” by McKinsey.
The current problem is that data is still centralized, patients rarely see the outcome of the trial and are unable to see how their data was accessed on an immutable ledger. We believe people need to be empowered with their health data and this needs to change.
Bowhead is currently working on its first decentralized clinical trial with a National Institute of Health and a leading University in United States. Bowhead expects this to become peer-reviewed research and to open up these Patient App and Clinical Trial Investigator tools for more researchers.
Health data privacy is top of mind
Vaccine Passports have become controversial due to health data privacy. For example, many people do not agree that you need to show a QR code with your vaccination status to enter a restaurant. Bowhead does not try to make a judgement call on whether it is ethically right or wrong but we do believe this attention to health data privacy will only increase as people need to own and control their health data. In Europe, blockchain-based provider Guardtime and the World Health Organization developed a QR Code system for vaccination status.
Bowhead has not developed any vaccine passports but is developing a QR-code based sharing system that allows Patients to share their data with Healthcare Providers using end-to-end encryption with 2 Factor Authentication.
Bowhead plans to release this Patient HCP health data sharing system in the Fall of 2021. This will enable:
- Consent tracking between patient and doctor
- Ledger on who and how data is being used
- Ability to revoke and manage the permissions
Our health data needs to be protected
Last but not least, the main reason why a decentralized health ecosystem is needed is to secure patient data. Finland is one of the leading countries as it relates to health data management, it is one of the first to have an electronic medical health record for its citizens and has one of the largest digital biodata banks in the world. In 2020, a hacker accessed the records of tens of thousands of mental health patients and started extorting them. This scenario would be much less likely if user’s owned their private keys and only authorized doctors/parties had been granted access via a Smart Contract.
Bowhead is currently developing a mental health platform to empower people to have a “therapist in their pocket”. The modules have been developed over the last year by trained mental health experts, psychotherapists and health coaches. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and in the future if a person wants to share specific data with their therapist they should be able to do so in the most secure way.
Building an Ecosystem of Digital Health
Bowhead’s mission to empower people to own and control their health data. What does this mean? This means becoming a data vault where people, governments, insurance companies, academics and life science organizations can modify and use secure tools for capturing, storing and distilling valuable health data. Today’s healthcare ecosystem remains complicated with many parties, please refer to our first technical whitepaper for more in depth analysis.
In simple terms it means providing:
1) Flexible Components for Health Apps
2) Secure API/Web Services Layer
3) Built-in Scaling and Compliance
We still believe hardware can play an important role in providing supplements and medicine at the right place and the right time. However we believe the immediate unmet global need is a scalable health data platform. Building flexible components for health apps, secure APIs and a scalable system using technology like Docker allows us to serve small organizations and startups that would like to customize a mobile app all the way up to a larger global scale deployment for a multinational organization that would like to deploy a digital health solution in several countries with different data residency and compliance needs.
We see a future where AHT can be used to pay for hosting, data processing and development services on the Bowhead Blockchain.
By building apps on top of Bowhead’s blockchain, we are validating our technology works. These applications provide a fertile ground to discuss partnerships with potential life science organizations.
healthDAO
What does the future of health data research look like?
Imagine a researcher at an accredited life science organization is seeking 1,000 patients with a rare disease to submit wearable and de-identified health data to train an algorithm. In today’s environment this request would take months and potentially several million dollars.
With HealthDAO, the researcher creates the Request, an Independent Ethics Review Board approves the request, and patients are notified via a secure anonymous matching system. The patients who participate accept Informed Consent (which is logged on the blockchain) and once the patients submit their encrypted data, health experts validate the data and patients can help train a federated learning algorithm. Patients who participated can collectively share in the ownership of this algorithm along with the sponsoring researchers.
We are planning to launch this patent-pending platform in 2022 that allows people to create NFTs for their health data (genomic, wearable, patient reported outcomes). We plan to allow people to use AHT for health data hosting, sponsoring competitions and pay for related products (Ex. health kits).
Another example of our product pipeline is our Paint Elf game currently in development is meant to be used to explore therapy using Virtual Reality. There is a growing science-based evidence that VR therapy can help with pain management and Art Therapy. We have a Proof of Concept (POC) application called PaintElf designed for the Oculus Quest 2 that allows people to color in VR. We are seeking partnerships with hospitals, clinics and academic research centers to help us validate our game with the goal of having enough validation to classify this application as a digital therapeutic. Before getting that classification with the FDA and Governing Bodies that regulate Software as A Medical Device (SaMD) we worked on developing a data management module for the gaming engine Unity. This now allows us to securely use Unity as a platform to connect to Bowhead’s secure data services.
If you have a Quest 2 and would like to test out PaintElf Alpha please contact us at support@bowheadhealth.com.
Our team has been working on these pieces for the last few years and we believe we are now in a position to begin opening up our network to more collaborators. If you are interested in contributing to technical writing, Open Science and Open Source projects please contact us at support@bowheadhealth.com.
Bowhead’s Decentralized Community Needs Your Community Support, Votes and Direction
We are pleased to announce a beta version of Bowhead’s AHT Staking and Voting Dashboard available at https://staking.bowheadhealth.com. Please note this is a beta version and to use at your own risk.Please note that during this beta, the terms are subject to change without any prior notice and retroactively.
Over the next several months and years, our plan is to decentralize the management and development of the AHT community — allowing the AHT community to define the direction and governance. The AHT Token Contract Address is (0x4cef5a02c36253cfb06825ace2a356e78000145f).
This first AHT staking system provides the:
- Capability to connect with MetaMask and AHT ERC-20 Tokens
- Ability to vote on Roadmap (1 token staked = 1 vote per proposal)
- Receive a portion of the AHT Reward Pool pro rata to the amount staked and time of the total staking period. The Countdown until Payout shows how much time is left in the staking period.
- You can vote on several proposals once you are Staking. You must vote on at least on one proposal to be eligible for the payout.
- Once you withdraw there is a 72 hour window to receive your AHT back.
We will be announcing an AHT Liquidity Mining event on Friday August 20, 2021. This event will start from 6:00 PM September 1 and end 6PM September 30th (All times in Central European Time).
We are also actively looking for AHT MasterNode operators who are interested in setting up Nodes in Europe, North America and Asia. Additional locations to follow in 2022. AHT MasterNode operators will need to be able to prove their node operator or infrastructure track record, complete KYC/AML and be a valid legal entity. For more details email us at support@bowheadhealth.com.
Please stay Tuned! Thank you for your continued support.
