First of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all of you for supporting our project. I greatly appreciated every warm and heartfelt comment on Medibyte’s introductory post yesterday and was sincerely touched by those of you who shared your own stories and experiences with the current EHR systems. Rest assured, we are doing this project for each and every one of you and will not rest until we have successfully created a decentralized and open solution to reform our medical record system!
Before we can detail the design and architecture of Medibyte, it is very important to describe the impact of our Decentralized EHR system on the three main user personas – the nurse, the physician and of course, you, the patient! Thus I will be devoting the following post to describe how Medibyte will be used by and inevitably benefit each of the aforementioned users through a sample clinical scenario.
The Nurse
Upon experiencing some discomfort in his chest while resting at home, a 54-yr old man immediately dials 9-1-1 and is whisked away to the hospital in an ambulance. Although a swarm of medical students immediately descend upon him when he arrives in the Emergency Department, it is the nurse who will triage the patient and initially record his medical information.
Equipped with Medibyte on her workstation computer, the nurse immediately performs a search for the patient on Medibyte and upon discovering that he is new to the system, she creates a new profile.
After creating the patient’s profile, she immediately enters his vital signs into a new record along with his chief complaint, past medical history, allergies and current medication list. The newly created medical record is saved on the Medibyte blockchain and can now be accessed by the patient’s physician.
Whereas the patient and his physician will have full access to his medical profile, the nurse can only access the Medibyte system while at the hospital. Once at home, the nurse will be unable to access records of any of her patients. This is to ensure that, outside of the hospital, only patients will be able to communicate their symptoms and chief complaints at any time of the day and physicians will be able to track all of their patients in real time.
The Physician
Once the nurse saves the medical record for the new patient on the blockchain, the physician is able to walk in and perform a more focused history and physical exam of the patient. Additionally, the nurse will be able to update the patient’s profile with lab results and radiology images as they are made available.
The physician will also be able to leverage Medibyte’s machine learning capabilities in order to get a predicted diagnosis based on the patient’s current condition. In this case, Medibyte uses its library of open source machine learning algorithms with the patient’s current symptoms and history in order to deliver a predicted diagnosis of Gastroesophageal reflux. Now, the physician can perform a more focused physical exam and order an ECG in order to rule out any cardiovascular issues.
Based on the results of the ECG, which will be immediately taken and added to the patient’s medical record on the blockchain, the physician will be able to determine his own diagnosis for the patient and compare it with that predicted by Medibyte.
Since physicians will also be entering their diagnoses into each medical record, Medibyte will be continuously using the symptoms and diagnoses from all of the patient records on its blockchain to improve the accuracy of its Machine Learning-powered Diagnosis Predictor.
As it turns out, the physician eventually agrees with the diagnosis predicted by Medibyte and decides on the basis of a relatively normal ECG and vital signs, that this patient was only experiencing acid reflux. He makes the appropriate changes to his medication list and includes a summary of the patient’s visit to the Emergency Department, which he uploads to the patient’s medical record on Medibyte, before allowing the patient to go home.
The physician will now have access to this patient’s medical record outside of the hospital after installing the Medibyte desktop application on their home computer. Thus, whenever this patient reports chest pain again or any other related symptoms, these complaints will be entered and immediately saved on the blockchain to be viewed in real-time by the physician.
The Patient
As soon as he gets home, the patient immediately turns on his computer and installs the Medibyte Desktop client. He then uses his medical record number to retrieve his record and is prompted to create a unique username and password. The patient will use this same username and password to log into Medibyte each time he needs to check his medical records. A notification will also be sent to his physician so that his physician can query and access this record at any time.
Furthermore, whenever the patient experiences any new symptoms, the patient can log into Medibyte and relay these complaints to his physician, who will have direct access to the patient’s medical profile and receive all messages sent by the patient. Also while logged into Medibyte, the patient and the physician can see when new lab results and imaging reports are added to the medical record.
While a patient can access his medical record on Medibyte at any time of the day or night, they will never have access to other patients’ records on the Blockchain. The physician will have access to medical records of all of their patients but will not be able to access records of patients belonging to other physicians.
Thus, Medibyte will be a decentralized EHR system that will allow patients to only see their medical records and physicians to access the records of only their patients. Patient confidentiality will be preserved while allowing physicians to stay updated on all of their patients. And of course, all patient records will be saved forever on the Medibyte blockchain and can be accessed from anywhere in the world.
I hope you gained an even better high-level understanding of Medibyte. We will definitely get more detailed in our discussion once we start covering design and architecture. Until then, I will work closely with @officialfuzzy and the dev team on the development of the prototype and keep you all posted every step of the way! Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments below. I always appreciate hearing new ideas and perspectives and certainly welcome the entire community to participate in this project!
In fact, I will be working with @officialfuzzy to launch a competition for the best and most creative logo for Medibyte! More details to come this weekend so stay tuned!
This is for you Steemit – let’s change the world together!
Until next time, keep acing life!
this is an interesting idea. Thanks for detailing it all so well. The competition sounds cool too, will keep watching this space.
Thanks @sallybeth23, I greatly appreciate it!
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This is interesting. I work with EHR systems. How can I learn more about this?
Thanks @kda90305! Glad to know that you're experienced with EHR systems. As we continue to work on this project, we will keep you all posted each step of the way. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please contact me and let me know!
Currently, for Epic Mychart Patients have to login to that hospitals servers to access their record. For example www.myhospital.com/mychart
To think of having a desktop client on the computer is phenomenal. Look forward to seeing this up and coming.
Thank you @aj41. Looking forward to hearing more from you as an EHR industry expert! I always welcome new ideas and perspectives as we construct a decentralized EHR solution primarily owned by the patient.
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