VerifyMed -- A blockchain platform for transparent trust in virtualized healthcare: Proof-of-concept
This addresses trust problems for patients and professionals in digitized healthcare, but it is incremental as it applies existing blockchain technology to a new domain.
The paper tackles trust issues in virtual healthcare by presenting VerifyMed, a blockchain-based platform for validating medical professionals' authorization and competence, with simulations showing costs of about $1 for creating a smart contract and 50 cents for evaluating a treatment.
Patients living in a digitized world can now interact with medical professionals through online services such as chat applications, video conferencing or indirectly through consulting services. These applications need to tackle several fundamental trust issues: 1. Checking and confirming that the person they are interacting with is a real person; 2. Validating that the healthcare professional has competence within the field in question; and 3. Confirming that the healthcare professional has a valid license to practice. In this paper, we present VerifyMed -- the first proof-of-concept platform, built on Ethereum, for transparently validating the authorization and competence of medical professionals using blockchain technology. Our platform models trust relationships within the healthcare industry to validate professional clinical authorization. Furthermore, it enables a healthcare professional to build a portfolio of real-life work experience and further validates the competence by storing outcome metrics reported by the patients. The extensive realistic simulations show that with our platform, an average cost for creating a smart contract for a treatment and getting it approved is around 1 USD, and the cost for evaluating a treatment is around 50 cents.