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Hyperledger HC-SIG

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Half-Year Report

Special Interest Group

Healthcare Special Interest Group (HC-SIG)

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The HC-SIG continues to mature as its membership mix and participation evolves. Total membership appears to have stabilized in a range between 950 and 980 members.  We have successfully completed our transition to structure the general group to serve as a “front door” to better engage and keep prospective new members active in the community, align them with resources, and connect them more directly with our three HC-SIG subgroups and various ad hoc teams.

HC-SIG General Meetings are held regularly and are generally well-attended, with a pattern of membership "regulars" starting to be seen. It's clear that meeting topic and/or special guest speaker typically drives attendance numbers.

From March through May of this year, and in direct response to the COVID-19 virus pandemic, the HC-SIG hosted a series of six Special Topic Meetings, with the intent of focusing the attention and engagement of HC-SIG membership and guest attendees on solving issues as they relate to the pandemic, ideally through the use of blockchain technologies. These meetings were very well attended, with attendance averages generally doubling through this special series of meetings.

HC-SIG Subgroups

HC-SIG Subgroups continue to evolve and include:

  • The Patient /Member Subgroup
  • The Payer Subgroup
  • The Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup

The Patient /Member Subgroup continues to meet at a regular pace, and with a great deal of membership involvement. The Payer Subgroup has faltered, recently "rebooted" and is considering a "reboot" in order to re-engage subgroup membershipnow seeing a renewal in membership engagement and most recently, acceptance of their project into Hyperledger Labs. The Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup--the newest HC-SIG subgroup–debuted earlier this quarterin the year, and continues to establish itself within the HC-SIG community, but is very slow in acquiring a regular membership core team and cadence.

HC-SIG Ad Hoc Teams

HC-SIG Ad Hoc Teams are developed around a specific need or use case, generally of a fixed duration. Ad hoc team leadership, if necessary, may determine that through their investigations, the team should become more regularly established for the sake of membership, and request to become a subgroup. HC-SIG Ad Hoc Teams include:

  • Active
    • Academic Research Team: developing a white paper to identify how best to engage the academic/healthcare community as the topic relates to blockchain technologies. While this team was temporarily on hold as leadership stepped away on sabbatical, and had again begun working to re-establish a regular cadence, it has again slowed in development, and we are actively seeking leadership to drive this team forward.
    • Use Case Development Team: charged with the discussion and development of use cases as applicable in the context of the healthcare industry. This team held a very productive first meeting, but with a recent change in leadership, had been paused, but with new leadership in place,  will likely resume in the coming weeks.
      Survey Review
  • Inactive
    • Academic Research Team: our annual review team has again begun preliminary work on the annual HC-SIG membership survey. This effort should be completed soon, and we'll shortly be releasing our survey for 2020.
    Inactive
    • While this team was temporarily on hold as leadership stepped away on sabbatical, and had again begun working to re-establish a regular cadence, it has again slowed in development, and we are actively seeking leadership to drive this team forward.
    • Charter Review Team: charged with reviewing, rewriting, and maintaining the HC-SIG Charter. Currently in recess until a charter review is required.
    • Subgroup Review Team: convened to review the status of the EMR Subgroup, and to consider how other subgroup models may influence future HC-SIG subgroup designs (disbanded after making recommendations to leadership team)
    • Wiki Redesign Team: initially convened to redesign the HC-SIG wiki, now working to manage wiki page conversion to Confluence, and sync with other SIG design efforts. Currently in recess until needed for any future design/redesign efforts.
    • Survey Review Team: our annual review team convened and worked on the annual HC-SIG membership survey. The survey was released on February 14, with results available here.

Of Merit

  • Special thanks to Deniz Coskun for the successful transition of the HC-SIG Patient/Member Subgroup to an extremely vibrant and productive team. Deniz's team had requested development access to Hyperledger Labs to move forward with their work efforts in this domain space, secured this lab space, and he and his team continue to develop their e-consent platform using both Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Indy.
  • HC HC-SIG General Meetings hosted the following guest speakers to present on topics relevant to the blockchain technologies in healthcare community:

    • Ben TaylorParkison, CEO of LedgerDomain, spoke on his team's work on the pharmaceutical supply chain. Ben shared learnings from the world's first iOS blockchain app for the clinical supply chain, which LedgerDomain developed in partnership with the Clinical Supply Blockchain Working Group (CSBWG), the world's largest pharmaceutical blockchain consortium. LedgerDomain is also partnering with UCLA on a pilot for the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) on a last-mile application that helps deliver lifesaving medications to babies. Both these projects feature Hyperledger Fabric.
    • Michael Marchant, Director of HIE and System Integration for UC Davis Health, discussed with HC-SIG membership the current state of health information exchange (HIE) standards and networks: to see what works well, what needs improvement, and through the presentation of several healthcare use cases, how blockchain technologies may serve as a viable solution.
      • Deniz Coskun, Chair of the HC-SIG Patient Subgroup, discussed with HC-SIG membership the current state of his team's work on their blockchain technologies (using both Hyperledger Fabric and Sawtooth) solution in support of pharmaceutical e-consent. This solution is expected to serve as the foundation for numerous other highly distributed and cryptographically secure healthcare solutions including patient recruitment and monitoring.
    • Director of Product Management at Lumedic, Inc., a healthcare startup focused on revenue cycle management (RCM) solutions, and recently acquired by Providence Health,  presented to HC-SIG membership a self-sovereign identity (SSI) management solution live demonstration using Hyperledger Indy to permit patients to electronically update providers and payers with member details through secure digital wallet transactions

Issues

Ongoing difficulties in assessing the value of work efforts exercised by HC-SIG leadership and membership attempting to broaden the overall appeal of the HC-SIG to new members. Engagement metrics would be greatly appreciated in helping to assess the overall success of such efforts.

New since this past quarter this the beginning of this year has been the deliberate attempt to extend HC-SIG General Meeting invitations and social media cards through various social media channels, particularly for HC-SIG guest presentations. It's currently unclear if new membership signups are correlated to these efforts.

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Membership and activity across the listserv(healthcare-sig@lists.hyperledger.org) appears to be stable. Our chat channel, #healthcare-sig (https://chat.hyperledger.org/channel/healthcare-sig), is seeing only periodic exchanges.

Patient

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Subgroup

Active since June, 2018 and led by Deniz Coskun, the Patient/Member Subgroup continues to work towards a build effort leveraging Hyperledger tools in the healthcare space. The group have meetings every other week and we are active in the healthcare Special Interest Group mailing list (see #patient-member-subgroup and for details).

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  • The establishment of regular speaker presentations from across the healthcare community to provide “real world” experiences in the design, implementation and establishment of a Hyperledger Project solution within their enterprise context. To date, our HC-SIG Guest Speaker presentations have been very successful at driving new HC-SIG membership interests

  • The establishment of additional HC-SIG subgroups or ad hoc teams that appeal to membership healthcare specialties

  • The ongoing design/redesign of the HC-SIG Wiki in order to:

    • Provide a more meaningful, consistent, and facile “front door” experience for new members to quickly discover HC-SIG resources and subgroups

    • For established members, serve as a dashboard of activities and accomplishments

    • Better separate (and highlight) our subgroups and ad hoc teams from general group coordination activities and governance

Patient

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Subgroup

With the shift to new leadership in June, the subgroup team has been active in identifying a clinical trials use case. The plan for this upcoming quarter will be to explore and mature the use case to a point where a POC for Informed Consent Process, E-Consent Process Flow can be defined and requirements expressed. Standardization of API`s and Hyperledger Solutions is a high priority. Great participation from different cultures; (including, but not limited to, East & West Coast US, England, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Argentina, and India). The group had calls almost twice a week, and created a fix team structure for the delivery of first POC on Hyperledger Sawtooth Framework. One of the important challenge was having SME Expert for E-Consent in the team. 

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