The Cryptonomist interviewed Dr. Abdullah Albeyatti, CEO of Medicalchain to speak about the current coronavirus crysis and how blockchain technology can help.
Your whitepaper mentions a bracelet containing a person’s medical information, any news about it?
The bracelet is an interesting piece in our whitepaper and which we demonstrated a prototype live to many audiences on our world tour where we met many different people, from different cultures but with the same medical record problems and frustrations.
As with any company, especially a start up – we had to prioritise our work streams and realised that first and foremost we needed to get our foundations ready to build on top of our Medicalchain system. After firstly cementing our blockchain infrastructure, we then needed to add a user interface to interact with this and so this led onto producing MyClinic.com.
We can easily add wearable devices to our platform, including our own prototype bracelet however to conform to health regulations we would need to complete a series of medical device tests, paperwork and commit a substantial investment to have our bracelet certified as a medical device. Therefore, we decided to continue developing, building and reforming our MyClinic.com solution first before committing to completing the bracelet project – but we hope it won’t be too long into the future!
At a time of health crisis like the one we are experiencing with the Coronavirus, how could the blockchain help? And how would your project help?
I think the blockchain could help similar to how the internet has been helping a great deal in this terrible time – however, it is all about how you utilise the technology. Blockchain in healthcare would be a great way to prove with an immutable audit trail someone’s COVID19 status, whether they had the right antibodies to the disease and in the near future hopefully, whether they have received the vaccine.
This would be a tremendous way of opening up the lockdown situation worldwide as we could return to travelling and crossing borders by demonstrating the above credentials needed to enter a country or city.
Medicalchain is of course heavily involved in trying to serve healthcare professionals and their patients during this difficult time, and myself as a doctor have been very busy in multiple clinics managing sick patients and helping where I can. As a result of this crisis, we created MyClinic.com Rooms in only 2 weeks!
This is a free video consultation tool which any healthcare professional worldwide can use to generate a clinic code and share this with their patients to begin consulting with them. It is being used in over 42 countries since the end of March and is being used by a range of professionals from doctors, dentists to physiotherapists and psychologists.
How is the overall development of Medicalchain going?
We are going from strength to strength increasing our teams size to match the workload to produce our solutions. We recently won an award from The Financial Times Intelligent Business 2019 Winners for our blockchain solution and have been recognised as a UK National Health Service approved online consultation provider as part of the DPS framework.
Lastly, we have agreed with the Medway Innovation Hub to pilot our tech in their Clinical Commissioning Group which is a group of 55 GP family practices from across the Medway towns serving a patient population of 295,223.
This year is proving to be a critical year for both health and tech and I believe that we are in a strong position to make the most of the opportunities being presented to us, not just nationally but on a global scale.
What do you think about the current economic crisis and the role of crypto and bitcoin?
I think we are all acutely aware of the fragility of the current global economic system which has taken a battering over the past few years. This most recent global pandemic has further highlighted how the system has to change and adapt as strong and reliable assets tumble one after the other with a barrel of oil now at its lowest price on record.
It is important and vital that those of us who understand and use cryptocurrency on a daily basis continue to support a currency such as bitcoin to let it naturally come to the mainstream and have a more substantial impact and role in modern day times.
This will only truly happen when nations realise that bitcoin is a more stable asset than what they are used to depending on and which are suffering in this global crisis.
