Q& A with Pradeep Goel, CEO Solve.Care
- Care is a healthcare platform built on blockchain technology. Can you tell me more about what Solve.Care hopes to do?
Solve.Care is a global healthcare platform that redefines care coordination, improves access to care, reduces benefit administration costs, and helps reduce fraud and waste across the healthcare sector globally. The Solve.Care platform enables an ecosystem for patient-centric care to be built, based on medical conditions, economic and social needs, and other tailored eligibility criteria.
Solve.Care is the first company to utilize digital currency and blockchain technology in healthcare for value-based payments. In short, our mission is to make healthcare work better for our parents, children, society, business, and the global economy.
- I see you recently announced the public release of Solve.Care’s Care.Protocol, a full stack blockchain platform for healthcare. Can you tell me more about this exciting development?
The recent announcement of our Care.Protocol ushers in a new era of decentralized digital networks, allowing anyone to define and publish decentralized applications (dApps) that are interoperable, secure, and personalized, on the Solve.Care Platform. Care.Protocol is a simplified declarative tool, allowing developers to author powerful, complete decentralized networks instead of coding. It allows everyone to take advantage of the Solve.Care full stack blockchain platform, at a fraction of the cost and time taken to market compared to the traditional IT systems. It’s easy to configure roles, relationships, journey and business logic makes it adaptable not only to healthcare, but every other industry. Every version of Care.Protocol is also anchored to the Blockchain which helps in immutable, traceable and easily distributable networks. Using Care.Protocol, it easily allows us to tokenize different aspects of healthcare relationships, such as, identity, consent, transactions, payments and interoperability. We are very excited about this announcement as this is a turning point for how healthcare will be accessed, administered, measured, and paid for in the future.
- Can you tell me more about Solve.Care’s Global Telehealthcare Exchange? What does it aim to do?
Our recently launched Global Telehealth Exchange (GTHE) enables patients to easily access healthcare services anywhere in the world. The introduction of the GTHE means that anyone seeking healthcare will no longer be limited to physical or geographical barriers when accessing medical practitioners. Users are able to access practitioners anywhere in the world through their personal devices. GTHE provides physicians who wish to practice telemedicine the opportunity to be listed on a blockchain registry, as opposed to a centralized system. Once a physician is listed, they can publish their profiles, rates, availability and appointments. Its automated features minimize most administrative work, allowing physicians to focus on practicing medicine. As it is
an open system, third party telehealth solutions will have the ability to access this registry as well. With a patient’s consent, doctors are able to access a patient’s past medical records, eliminating the time wasted conducting repeat assessments and unnecessary medical tests. All records and transactions are stored on the blockchain, meaning users of GTHE can rest assured that their records are secure.
- I see Solve.Care has recently announced Global Telehealth Exchange is expanding toIndia? Can you tell me more about why you chose India?
Solve.Care announced its expansion plans for GTHE to India this month. This means that locally registered doctors in India can now sign-up for this global service to expand their practice both within the country and internationally. This is another exciting development for the growth of GTHE. To accelerate the roll-out in India, we partnered with HealthLink Technologies, a homegrown local healthtech company in India. They are on board to assist GTHE in ensuring compliance with regulatory and licencing issues relevant to the Indian market, as well as in the verification of medical licences of physicians.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic across the world, telehealth consultations have experienced record growth globally. In India, the new guidelines for telemedicine practice published by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) in March 2020, have further accelerated the use of telehealth services in the country. GTHE offers medical professionals a reliable solution so they can deliver their services anywhere in the world. In addition, GTHE will help address the shortage of doctors in the country by increasing existing doctor’s efficiency, enabling them to see more patients in a shorter time frame. Furthermore, the acute shortage of doctors in rural areas will no longer be an issue, as doctors in cities can easily provide teleconsultation services to those in the underserved less populated areas.
- Why, according to you, is the use of blockchain in healthcare important in today’sworld? What are the biggest and most impactful ways that blockchain is being used in healthcare now?
Current healthcare trends and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic have made it essential that we rethink how we approach healthcare. At the moment, healthcare systems are centralised which is leading to a slower, less efficient delivery of healthcare. The majority of healthcare providers’ efforts, costs, disputes, and frustrations are caused by many different factors like consent management, data management, and compliance with various administrative and clinical protocols. This is due to the different stakeholders in healthcare all wanting control of the data. By switching this around, providing patients with control and ownership of their data, we can then easily build interoperability around the patient using blockchain as the coordination fabric.
The introduction of blockchain in healthcare makes the administrative, care delivery, and payment processes transparent helping to reduce fraud and administrative burdens on the doctor to bill and on the insurer to adjudicate, and for the patient to do a co-payment. By utilizing
blockchain technology, we can eliminate all these time consuming and wasteful processes. The auditability, transparency, and encryption of blockchain allows for a more efficient, effective, and transparent credential management processes.
Blockchain technology allows the user or patient full autonomy over their data. The Solve.Care Platform is designed to address these issues in a fully automated fashion. Consent management, data management, and compliance become largely or fully automated and auditable when on the blockchain. This principle of transparency and automation in data ownership, digital consents, and payments will change how healthcare is administered. I am confident that this should become the de facto standard in the management of healthcare. Introducing blockchain technology to healthcare means that medical professionals can take more time to focus on their patients and deliver quality care.