[This proposal comes from @maessedai. To support this proposal, sign it by clicking the like (heart) button beneath this post.]
Problem: Currently many medical companies (hospitals, doctors offices, labs, etc.) use completely different software systems to keep private medical data encrypted. This serves the purpose for keeping sensitive medical information private within individual clinics or hospitals or health systems. However, people often are moving between different doctors and hospital systems for differing levels of care (primary care doctors, emergency room medicine, specialists, surgeries, etc.) Because of this, doctor’s offices, hospitals, health systems often share data with each other in the most antiquated ways including physically receiving patient data through the physical mail, fax, or CD (you remember those). They do this to maintain privacy of medical records.
Proposal: What if all of these medical systems could trust a decentralized application to transfer sensitive medical data across an application that would allow these files to be downloaded and uploaded with complete privacy. Hopr Med dApp would be the solution to this industry wide problem. No more would doctor’s offices and hospitals go through the tedius work of receiving physical medical data and scanning or entering the information into their own internal encrypted systems. Instead every medical office could download and sign in to the Hopr Med dApp and transmit sensitive medical information completely encrypted with a push of the button. Upload and Download encrypted medical information between offices without the use of fax, snail mail, or cd.
Use Case:
This would serve a great need for private data transfer between different medical data systems. Having a third party private application like Hopr Med App would make it easy for medical systems not only share data but get on board. Rather than mailing or faxing or writing data to a CD they would be able to dowload the dApp and communicate using Hoprs node system. These medical systems would pay for this service which in turn would be converted to hopr tokens to be distributed to the node runners. The main intended audience for this would be in the medical field, but it does not mean it could not later be extended to other use cases for transmission of data using the Hopr protocol.
How would this benefit Hopr protocol: The problem this dApp would solve is an industry wide problem and would allow Hopr as an organization and the protocol itself to take center stage in the ultimate protection of sensitive medical data. Although Hopr has already started in this area it has been mostly with internal data systems rather than an industry wide accessible dApp. I believe this would be the more easily adopted technology for the medical industry. Currently most medical organizations have their own encryption programs they use for the entire organization. To adapt their current programs is a tougher sell than to offer to fix an issue without having to change their organizations programming. Instead of a huge hospital changing how their data is transferred internally (big ask) this would be understood by the industry to solve a huge problem they all have externally (much smaller ask). The adoption of the protocol would be substantially larger with this proposal and therefore would benefit the protocol, the Hopr organization, the node runners, and investors.
The dApp Itself: The dApp itself would need to have an accessible sign in for most operating systems and an on ramp and off ramp to the hopr protocol. I am not a coder so I don’t know how helpful I could be in imagining this area of what is possible for the dApp.
[To view the original discussion, click here]