By James Norman
Digital healthcare devices are playing an increasingly important role in improving someone’s health by providing accurate and timely information about their health status and enabling them to monitor and manage their conditions more effectively. The increasing trend of wearables that collect data about our behaviors and what is going on in our bodies will continue to evolve and play a more prominent role in personalized healthcare delivery. These devices are likely to evolve significantly on Web3.
First, let’s consider some of the most basic uses for healthcare devices and the benefits it is bringing to people today:
- Early detection and diagnosis: Devices such as blood glucose, blood pressure, and ECG monitors can help detect early signs of health issues, enabling prompt intervention and treatment.
- Remote monitoring: Remote patient monitoring systems can provide real-time information about someone’s health status, enabling healthcare professionals to monitor their conditions remotely and intervene when necessary.
- Disease management: Healthcare devices can help people manage chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and asthma by providing continuous monitoring and feedback, enabling them to make informed real-time decisions about their lifestyle and medications.
- Fitness tracking: step counting, exercise regimens, daily goals, competitions, and much more to help track and increase physical activity assisting in overall health.
As technology continues to evolve, healthcare devices are likely to play an increasingly important role in personalizing treatment, and improving health outcomes and quality of life for those who use them. We continue to see partnerships with device manufacturers and specialized medical programs to help physicians engage patients proactively with their health conditions. The data generated from the devices provide regular actionable metrics to caregivers which can have a profound effect on the treatment course to take and sometimes can have lifesaving impacts. Consider that even still today, without the use of healthcare devices in the hands of patients, people still must go to a provider to get something as simple as having their blood pressure taken.
Digital healthcare devices are getting more common in households worldwide.
As device technology continues to improve and expand, so does the strain on the web’s existing infrastructure. As billions of connected devices generate web traffic, coupled with exponential growth in data storage, the current client-server architecture cannot meet the requirements of the next-generation web. Web3 architecture is distributed, secure, and decentralized and provides significant scalability advantages:
- Decentralized data storage: secure storage for patient health data, enabling patients to retain ownership and control of their data and to share it with healthcare providers on a need-to-know basis.
- Smart contracts for data sharing: enable patients to grant or revoke access to their health data, ensuring that their privacy is protected and that their data is only used for approved purposes.
- Improved interoperability: enable integration of different healthcare systems and devices, making it easier for providers to access and analyze patient health data from multiple sources.
- Real-time alerts and notifications: enable healthcare providers to intervene quickly in case of emergency or other critical situations.
- Tokenization of health data: creating new revenue streams for patients and healthcare providers and incentivizing patients to share their data with researchers and other third parties (this could be a whole topic for another time).
One of the key advantages of Web3 is that it enables the creation of decentralized applications (dApps) that are not controlled by any central authority. This means that healthcare devices can be built on Web3 as dApps that allow users to take control of their health data and share it with healthcare providers, family members, caregivers, and researchers in a secure and transparent way.
Solve.Care provides a blockchain platform (Care.Platform) to build digital health networks which will include dApps for a wide spectrum of purposes to address problems in healthcare. Healthcare delivery (including device data), eligibility, benefits determination, payments, engagement, and connecting a global community are focus areas where Web3 can be applied to provide positive change in the global healthcare economy. Our technology objective is to provide a platform where dApps can be built.
Most importantly, Care.Platform will enable others (companies, organizations, governments, individuals, etc.) to build dApps that can improve the effectiveness of a healthcare network. To really change the landscape of healthcare and make it more effective for our next generations, we must allow people to own their healthcare data, make it interoperable and secure, and provide timely actionable information to physicians, patients, and caregivers when it is needed most.
Web3 and medical device data will have a profound positive impact on the healthcare economy while providing actionable data to patients and their caregivers. Aging infrastructure and legacy architecture will not meet the needs of the modern world. The evolution of digital healthcare devices on Web3 will lead to a more decentralized, secure, and transparent healthcare system that empowers individuals to take control of their health data. The amount of data and transactions occurring on centralized infrastructure grows exponentially every day and the shift to Web3 will allow for scalability and security while enabling a better data ownership and interoperability model leading us to a healthier future for our next generation and the generations to come.
