MintHealth: Empowering Patients to Take Control of their Health and Data via Blockchain Technology

BOSTON, Oct. 26, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- (2017 Connected Health Conference) – Seasoned healthcare executives and physician entrepreneurs announce the launch of MintHealth, a portable, secure, and self-sovereign personal health record (PHR) built using blockchain technology. This global decentralized health platform will align all healthcare stakeholders around the shared goal of empowering patients to minimize their risk for developing and suffering complications of chronic conditions. The mobile app leverages gamification technology for patient engagement and digital incentives called vidamints™. MintHealth will also release a companion clinical tool for healthcare providers to aid in managing the health of the populations for whom they provide care.

Visionary physician entrepreneurs, Drs. Samir Damani and Vishal Verma, are bringing their expertise to MintHealth to tackle the rising costs of global healthcare – a byproduct of a system that has largely focused on treating illness, rather than proactively managing modifiable risk factors including obesity, diabetes, hypertension, sedentary behavior, tobacco use, and poor nutrition. Damani and Verma are currently Board Members and Founders of leading technology companies MD Revolution and Nucleus Health, respectively. Both companies have been focused on enabling better healthcare outcomes through improved data management and personalized healthcare delivery.

"While the idea of promoting wellness to improve health is not new, previous efforts have failed because of siloed clinical and behavioral data, the inability to incentivize patient behaviors, and the lack of a platform that aligns patients, providers, and payers around patient empowerment. Today, blockchain technology and the use of digital incentives, such as vidamints™, will revolutionize the way we manage patients at risk for and those who have already developed chronic conditions," said Dr. Damani, CEO and co-founder of MintHealth.

MintHealth Platform

In its first phase, MintHealth will be rolling out the platform to commercial health insurance plans, known as payers, to help engage patients with chronic conditions, such as heart failure, diabetes, hypertension, and other conditions that account for over 90 percent of healthcare costs today. In addition, patients at risk for, but not yet suffering from chronic conditions, will also benefit from the following features of the platform:

• Self-sovereign medical record designed to empower patients through control of their own health data.
• Incentive tokens in the form of vidamints™ and gamification to engage patients in their journey to better health.
• Blockchain enabled data liquidity that allows for seamless movement of clinical and behavioral data between existing physician and patient data siloes.
• Machine learning on a growing patient database to help identify predictors of disease and health.
  

MintHealth's patient engagement platform will be accessible via web or mobile application, and designed to align patient and provider incentives to improve health outcomes and promote value-based care (greater quality per unit of cost). Patients will set up a self-sovereign personal health record (PHR) and be assigned a unique global identifier enabled by blockchain technology. The objective of the self-sovereign record will be to allow the patient to control permissions and access to their data in real time.

"The initial step of digitizing health data in electronic health record systems (EHRs) moved us towards value-based care. Now, patients need a self-sovereign, secure record that can seamlessly move between patient and provider data siloes, and in a manner that empowers them to be the CEO of their own health. Blockchain technology holds great promise for enabling the data liquidity necessary to execute on our vision of improved population health, and at lower cost," said Tee Green, Executive Chairman of Greenway Health, a leading electronic health record vendor used by over 75,000 providers and touching nearly 100 million lives.

Incentivizing rewards and vidamints™

Vidamints™ (VIDA) align stakeholders in the MintHealth ecosystem. The core functionality of the VIDA token is to reward patients for engaging in healthy behaviors that are assigned to them through the MintHealth mobile app. VIDA tokens are funded by healthcare payers who have financial incentive to see patient populations improve their health, thereby reducing insurance claims around chronic conditions and lowering costs. Healthcare providers and the patient's social network can also create and assign healthy behaviors. Once a behavior is assigned, VIDA tokens reside in an escrow vault smart contract and are delivered to the patient's wallet upon successful completion of each behavior.

Upon receiving VIDA tokens, patients can use the tokens to receive discounts and as a method of payment to partially offset healthcare related expenses including premiums, co-pays, goods and services (e.g., pharmacies, physical therapy providers, spas, nutrition stores, etc.). Patients will also utilize the VIDA token to initialize their self-sovereign health record and to vote on important ecosystem data use policies. 

About MintHealth

MintHealth is a global decentralized health platform that aligns patients, providers, and payers around patient empowerment. The platform enables the patient to manage their own self-sovereign health identity and record, secured via blockchain, and engages the ecosystem to drive healthy patient behavior through the vidamint™ token.  For more info, visit: https://www.minthealth.io/.

SOURCE MintHealth