There is an enormous amount of medical data out there, but the healthcare industry remains flawed, and its data is difficult to use for research purposes due to its overall poor quality and lack of transparency. Obtaining accurate, reliable data can improve medicine and therefore people’s everyday lives on a global basis. Blockchain technology could be the best solution for these data-related issues within the industry.
Aimedis, founded in 2020, is a blockchain-based platform that offers various affordable and effective health services, including teleconsulting, appointment management, getting prescriptions, medical records, connecting to tracking devices, and more.
The platform itself is active in almost every continent, with a large number of patients already onboarded, and a goal of reaching 1 million patients by the end of 2022.
Aimedis is launching the first scientific and medical NFT marketplace in November, starting with a cancer trial.
The founders of Aimedis, Ben J.O. El Idrissi and Michael J. Kaldasch, are doctors who have worked in medicine and pharmaceuticals for over ten years. During an exclusive interview, Kaldasch told DailyCoin about the flaws of the pharmaceutical industry, and how, with the help of blockchain technology, Aimedis seeks to improve research and data quality in the healthcare industry.
The Need to Improve the Traditional Pharmaceutical Industry
The old ways that pharmaceutical trial studies work consumes a lot of time and money. The pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars to perform trials, of which around 90% fail. There is a lot of data in the medical industry, with dummy data used in trials too. Nevertheless, sometimes drugs work out well and are verified after successful trials with inaccurate data.
“We've been working in the pharmaceutical industry for quite some time and we know well the insights of it. I was a drug safety officer for some time, and I did some trials for large pharmaceutical companies. I had to deal with problematic data, and I saw the process of how the data is used and generated.
In some instances, there were a lot of paper sheets with hard-to-read or accidentally deleted information. Even when you take a look at electronic documents, you still don't know what has been changed, and whether the data is real and genuine,” Kaldasch explained.
Often, especially in developing countries, people are exploited for their data, and participate in pharmaceutical trials without even knowing as much. Due to this, some people and corporations make good money gathering data, while patients are completely left out.
Blockchain Can Bring High Quality Data to the Medical Industry
With the NFT marketplace, Aimedis is seeking to change the system completely. Hospitals, researchers, health care providers, and doctors will be able to generate NFTs and put anonymized data into them, sign the data, and then sell it to the pharmaceutical industry, researchers, and AI companies. This is important because, even with artificial intelligence, if the data is incorrect and of poor quality, the advanced technology being utilized will be rendered useless.
Kaldasch explained that the platform works in such a way that no one would have any access to patients’ information. Patients would have to actively opt in to their data being used or stored into NFTs. There will also be a dashboard, which will provide information about the trial. Depending on the data required, individuals can choose to participate, though they will not be able to upload data by themselves. Participants will always have to go through healthcare professionals to avoid generating dummy, or false medical data for the sake of earning money. Only medical professionals can upload data (in the form of an NFT) from patients that decide to participate while staying anonymous.
“Another important fact is that we finance the trials that we do while we are selling the NFTs. So this makes us independent from the pharmaceutical industry. Imagine you have a drug that is examined. Normally, the pharmaceutical company that produces the drug finances the trial, which can be problematic,” the Aimedis CEO said.
Aimedis also wants to help the pharmaceutical industry to avoid the issue of false data. That way companies can save a lot of time and money, because every NFT bought has a certain structure, and a certain type of data. They can thus rely on them to buy an NFT, and thereby gain access to valuable data.
When someone asks about the price of medical data from patients with cancer or heart conditions, it’s impossible to give an accurate quote, because for each trial there are separate prices. It all depends on how much effort and how much money was put into the generation of patient groups and the study’s design. With NFTs, it will become possible to provide a price tag, after some time.
“We also have the opportunity to start trials and examinations regarding orphan diseases, where the pharmaceutical company is not so active because there are not many people suffering from such illnesses,” Kaldasch underlined.
Since the pharmaceutical industry must earn money from what they do, producing certain drugs and looking for cures for rare diseases isn’t profitable, due to the low number of people who would buy the drug.
The AIMx Token and the New Project
The AIMx token is part of the NFT marketplace. People who mint or buy the token receive a discount when they use it. This is an intrinsic aspect to motivate the use of the token inside the NFT marketplace system. AIMx has several functionalities: payment, utility, governance, DeFi, and is even a social token.
The social component will come into play next year with a social medical platform where patients can interact with each other, and self-help groups can be created. Healthcare professionals will always ensure that the information produced is valid prior to its use. Governance in Aimedis will be done by token holders, who can decide on the happenings within the social medical channels, as well as the functionalities of the internal system.
On The Flipside
- For blockchain to be fully effective in the healthcare industry, the technology has to be combined with other systems, and have enough participants in medical trials.
- Technological transitions will take time to be fully implemented within the industry.
Why You Should Care?
There is global demand for improvements to medical data and transparency in the pharmaceutical industry. Blockchain can be revolutionary in the medical industry, as it can inherently help to provide clarity to medical records, offer tools for medical specialists, and connect research companies with hospitals and patients across the globe.
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