Disclaimer: As the founder of Potion Owl. This serves as a pitch to investors in the cryptocurrency and healthcare space with an emphasis on the problems and the solutions we intend to provide.
Overview
Started in 2014 as a personal project built using PHP, Python and JavaScript. As a born asthmatic; receiving treatment since birth, I grew up hoping that his prescribed treatment would eventually relieve me of this condition during adolescence. This has not been the case and two key reasons were cited for this:
• Allegiance to one medical practitioner during treatment which meant a second opinion never surfaced.• Poor management according to several practitioners who indicated that if he had been issued a preventer in conjunction with a reliever during childhood the outcome would have likely been different.
In addition several incidences which resulted in the loss of loved ones only served to reinforce my comittment to improving healthcare services through technology.
Foundation
On August 13, 2015 Potion Owl took its first step from concept to company by securing its first healthcare facility in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. As of January 2017, Potion Owl has captured most of the Electronic Health Records (EHR) market within its founding country’s major parishes: Kingston, St. Andrew, St. Ann and St. James, which are also prime tourist destinations. This translates into easier access to healthcare for visitors from other countries.
The advent of Blockchain technology means that our team is looking to integrate our platform with Ethereum on the Mainnet. We are focused on understanding and addressing healthcare service needs in an easy, flexible, integrated and secure manner. We believe that Potion Owl has the potential to interconnect Healthcare services globally.
Potion Owl is building an ecosystem that is designed to facilitate on-demand, secure and universal access to healthcare services and is now integrating Blockchain technology. Potion Owl intends to introduce a token (PTN), that participants in the ecosystem will use for all Healthcare services. Potion Owl’s aim with this Ecosystem is to ensure that all users (patients) are afforded the attention offered by healthcare services in any region for e.g. receive prescription drugs from pharmacies world-wide, whilst still being supported by their preferred service providers (such as health insurance companies). This should ultimately:
- Eliminate difficulty in accessibility
- Remove inefficiencies
- Enhance security & privacy
- Improve user experience
- Improve the current healthcare services system.
The Current Challenges within the Healthcare Services Using Tech
The need for cooperation between healthcare providers ranging from specialists, primary care physicians, pharmacists and service providers (such as insurance companies) has resulted in increasing use of digital technologies. Though these solutions have significantly improved the tracking and efficiency for delivering care, they have resulted in creating isolations of health information, primarily within electronic medical records (EMR) systems.
Health and government organizations spend a significant amount of time and money setting up and managing traditional information systems and data exchanges; requiring resources to continuously troubleshoot issues, update field parameters, perform backup and recovery measures, and extract information for reporting purposes. However, most hospital systems still are unable to easily (or safely) share their data.
As a result, doctors are spending more time typing than talking to patients. Physician burnouts jumped from 45 to 54 percent between 2011 and 2014 5. Although there exists the notion of “individualized” health information both on the clinical and wellness fronts, these have not translated into “personalized” plans of care. Furthermore, even though there is a plethora of data, the overall healthcare ecosystem is incapable of adequately engineering a value or risk to big data to help better predict future care episodes of a patient.
The current solutions therefore pursued by the Healthcare technology industry have resulted in a difficult choice between care and privacy/economic fraud for patients. We see this issue greatly expanding as more data is being created by the industry. Blockchain technology can help resolve these issues.
The new healthcare paradigm demands effective and optimal care delivery for patients to yield better care outcomes. This means that all healthcare providers need to actively coordinate and collaborate with each other. For this to be successful, patient information needs to be streamlined in such a way that it is accessible to all providers and that it provides flexibility and accessibility.
EHR (Electronic Health Record) software currently prohibits an effective patient-provider relationship. Patient portals have minimal engagement among patients because of the isolated patient experience. Furthermore, this software only provides a limited capability of exchange of information from one system to another and usually requires a designated individual who is capable of such information transfer. This has led to an increasing amount of delay between organizations in delivering care for the patient and has also resulted in the overall decrease in quality of delivery of care services to the patient. Furthermore, as care providers are spending more of their time involved in coordination of care, while their effectiveness in treatment of patients has increased there is also a significant increase in their workload.
This has resulted in a counter-intuitive impact in care outcomes for patients. In addition, given that many doctors do not want patients to access EHRs (Electronic Health Records), patients adopt a passive role in tracking their health. This can ultimately cause patients to feel a lack of control over and ownership of their health leading to patient frustration with and disengagement from their care.
While there is a recent increase in Mobile Healthcare apps that help individuals to track their vitals and health parameters, this novelty has not necessarily translated into improved patient care, adherence and better overall patient outcomes as this too faces challenges with EHR (Electronic Health Record) integration.
Generational Factors
While it was once considered normal to visit only one doctor for routine check-ups and medical attention; Millennials and Generation Z are likely to switch doctors and/have multiple options.
The team at ghg | greyhealth group partnered with Kantar Health to survey more than 2,000 millennials to discover how they manage their own healthcare. They found that they are less likely to trust physicians and are far more inclined to consult online experts and other informal sources for advice. They are eager for the system to meet their needs, yet, players in healthcare continue to cling to an old model: a primary care physician serves as a trusted advisor for patients and a trusted intermediary for pharmaceutical companies and insurers.
Millennials reject that model, and the industry needs to keep up or lose out. Millennials are poised to become a major force in the $3 trillion per year healthcare market. With this group expected to spend over $10 trillion over their lifetimes, 8 the medical arena would be prudent to be more accommodating of a seamless healthcare experience. Generation Z’s dependence on technology means that they are also overly reliant on technology and will use this to gain access to healthcare as they prioritize flexibility over rigidness.
Potion Owl’s Planned Ecosystem
In its next phase of development facilitated by a token sale Potion Owl intends to improve its existing services to develop a fully decentralized ecosystem for healthcare services. The Ecosystem will consist of four (4) new components:
1. A variety of smart contracts2. An indigenous utility token known as the Potion Owl token or “PTN”3. Decentralized applications introduced by Potion Owl4. Developer tools that allow for creation of applications within Potion Owl
Users of Potion Owl will have access to healthcare services in all regions where the ecosystem is facilitated. For example: a tourist from the EU visiting Jamaica would have access to doctors, pharmacies and be able to use their insurance coverage while on vacation and vice-versa. The PTN token will be used in such a way that it will provide verification of doctor visits, authentication of prescriptions and insurance claims among other uses through smart contracts.
Potion Owl will be designed to incentivize participation by Healthcare providers which includes: Doctors, Pharmacies, Medical Centres and Hospitals among others as well as service providers such as insurance companies. Just as users have the flexibility to access healthcare services, so too will all providers within the ecosystem have access to their information. Healthcare providers will not be bewildered about a patient’s/customer’s history with the proposed system of flexibility.
Potion Owl intends for this kind of robust and decentralized ecosystem to emerge using smart contract implementation. The ecosystem is intended to ensure that users have access to their personal health information, by requesting same from healthcare providers as necessary.
The smart contracts will also enable healthcare providers to offer details to Service Providers (that is insurance companies among others) as is relevant, and Service Providers to determine which Healthcare Providers are offering specific details with accuracy. Each Healthcare provider can publish a cost at which it is prepared to sell its non-identifiable patient data, example diabetes trends in a specific region or country, while the Service Providers, example insurance companies and researchers, will also be protected from fraud through multiple runs of the same data due to abuse of health insurance policy holders’ agreement.
Once the Healthcare Provider, Service Provider and User all sign-off on the transaction via the smart contract system, the Service Provider will credit the Healthcare Provider in PTN. The smart contract will then allocate a set portion of the PTN to the User to incentivize user participation in the Ecosystem. Users will be able to use their PTN for prescriptions, doctor visits, and other health related services.
Addtitionally, Developer tools will allow anyone from the IT administrator to a manager to make a few modifications to existing templates, and have a workable application running on top of Potion Owl’s platform. In addition, there will be a more technical offering for advanced developers with the language of choice being JavaScript; the most popular programming language globally. This ensures many developers adopt use our platform to help tackle the issues of healthcare services through tech. A category that has remained largely under-served.
Ultimately, Potion Owl intends for healthcare providers, users (patients) and service providers among others to be provided with flexibility, accessibility and freedom (features which are desperately lacking from the current healthcare system due to isolation) while not compromising security, integrity and privacy. All this should be achieved with an appreciation for aesthetics, ease of use and time sensitivity.
Summary
Potion Owl envisions a world in which Healthcare Services are easily accessible to everyone. The decentralized nature along with developer tools and tokens to power various transactions has made it a more ideal time in human history than any other for Healthcare Services to make a great transitional shift towards convenience and ease of access.
Retail purchases are synonymous with Amazon, “ride hailing” is synonymous with ‘Lyft’, ‘Uber’ and ‘Didi Chuxing’ just to name a few and “accommodations” is synonymous with AirBnB. One of the most pressing questions of our generation should therefore be “What technology is Healthcare services synonymous with?”
This is the problem that Potion Owl is purposed to solve. Again, we do not believe this is a winner takes all race and as such we look to integrate technologies from good projects and partner with ones that have brilliant initiatives to realize the goal of remodeling Healthcare Services. Some risk their health to accumulate all their wealth, then spend their wealth attempting to rescue their health. Why not achieve both simultaneously? Join the Potion Owl journey, stay in the know with secure access to healthcare services; anytime, anywhere.
Tokensale website: https://tokensale.potionowl.com/ (Presale is ongoing)
Telegram: https://t.me/potionowlico
Current Platform: https://www.potionowl.com/