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The HC-SIG continues to evolve as it grows in membership, participation, and activities. We have successfully completed our transition to structure the General Group 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.
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General Group
The general group (HC-SIG) serves as an entrée for prospective members in the global healthcare community interested in understanding how best to educate themselves and participate in the implementation of blockchain technologies–ostensibly using the Hyperledger Project umbrella of frameworks, tools, and extensive community–in order to create secure and healthcare-compliant enterprise solutions. For more established members, the general group serves as a resource for the notification and publication of relevant community healthcare activities (e.g., healthcare conferences), as well as a means for promoting and encouraging the project engagement and accomplishments of each of its three subgroups.
The general group (HC-SIG) holds a regular meeting on a bi-weekly basis on Friday mornings at 0700 (Pacific Time). As a regular agenda item, HC-SIG Subgroup subgroup leads (or their proxy) “roll up” their subgroup activities so as to educate prospective new members on active project opportunities.
Membership and activity across the healthcare-wg listserv(healthcare-sig@lists.hyperledger.org) continue to grow. Listserv membership is currently at ~1045 ~1050 members. Our chat channel, #healthcare-sig (https://chat.hyperledger.org/channel/healthcare-sig), is seeing semi-regular daily exchanges.
Patient/Member Subgroup
!!BENJAMIN
Active since June, 2018 and led by Marissa IannaroneBenjamin Djidi, the Patient/Member Subgroup continues to work towards a build effort leveraging Hyperledger tools in the healthcare space. We have meetings every other week and we are active in the healthcare Special Interest Group mailing list (see #patient-member-subgroup and #DonorMilk for details). We aren't seeing a lot of engagement on Rocket.Chat or on the Wiki, but we continue to work to engage folks on those platforms.
While Hyperledger Global Forum application cited in the June update was not accepted, we continue to move the Human Donor Milk Use Case forward. Enough cannot be said about the incredible contributors to this subgroup, and collaboration with Rapid Healthcare has been a great asset as the project continues to grow and mature. A summary of activities are as follows:
Applying for and receiving the Labs designation and the HubSpot holds the code - Lab approved on 8/3/2018
We continue working to build requirements (even rather informally) via the wiki reviewing national guidelines and doing independent research in order to understand the network and how Fabric can be leveraged to solve existing challenges
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) have been engaged both on the donor bank and Hospital side in order to ensure that what we are building is meeting actual business needs; we continue actively look for more SMEs
We completed a HiMSS AsiaPac submission for this PoC and we are waiting to hear back - submitted 9/14/2018
Finally, the subgroup lead was asked to be a moderator for a panel at the Hyperledger Global Forum entitled “Public Chain or Permissioned Ledger - How To Choose?” and is looking forward to representing the subgroup and the HC-SIG at the event.
Payer Subgroup
!!RAVEESH
The Payer Subgroup has been actively working since inception in June 2018 and is being led by Raveesh Dewan from CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. The group continues to refine the use cases and to ensure the right use cases are being picked for POCs. See the activity at https://lists.hyperledger.org/g/healthcare-wg/search?q=%23payer-subgroup&ct=1.
The subgroup meets on a regular basis every Tuesday from 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM EST.
The subgroup started with exploring current problems in the payer industry that can leverage blockchain solutions. The group started having discussion around scoping the activities and decided on two specific deliverables:
A white paper focused on the challenges with healthcare payers using Hyperledger: this paper will review valid use cases, pick a few use cases and demonstrate how Hyperledger can help
Creating a POC based on one of the use cases identified in the white paper
We started discussions around various use cases and a number of meetings were dedicated to following use cases:
Authorizations
Provider Data Management
Value Based Care
The subgroup did get a chance to invite various SMEs from the industry to understand the business processes. Thanks to Tony Little, who shared a use case that Optum is focused on addressing the Provider Data issues in the payer industry. Thanks to Richard Cole, Steven Elliott, Chris Cole who shared other use cases that have great potential.
As we discussed these use cases, it became clear that we need to have a decision framework to establish the validity of a use case for blockchain use. Subgroup members decided to come up with a decision framework white paper. The team is activity working through that as of now. While the subgroup team is starting at a general level, it will be later customized for application in the payer industry. Thanks to Jeff Stollman for walking us through the initial decision flow he came up with.
The best part of this subgroup is that everyone is contributing actively.
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Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup
!!STEVEN
With the recent charter approval in mid-March, the Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup (HC-SIG HIS) has not yet had its first meeting, but preliminary membership interests are high. Steven Elliott serves as the HIS Lead.
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Upcoming activities planned by the general group include:
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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
- The establishment of additional HC-SIG subgroups that appeal to membership healthcare specialties
- The development of an online HC-SIG healthcare resource for blockchain technologies. Numerous HC-SIG members have asked for academically-based educational resources to both learn about, and better communicate the value proposition of blockchain technologies in healthcare
The completion of the redesign and migration A redesign of the HC-SIG Wiki in order to:
Provide a more meaningful “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 (where the real action is) from general WG group coordinating activities/governance
Patient/Member Subgroup
!!BENJAMIN
The Patient/Member Subgroup will continue to to work on the donor milk use case through next quarter, finalizing the PoC, and then looking at expanding to additional use cases. This work will include building/refining requirements and building the code base.
Payer Subgroup
!!RAVEESH
Activities planned for the next quarter include:
Continue working on a white paper on the General Decision Framework and Decision Framework for Payer Industry (target for completion in Q4-2018)
Future plans:
Start working on a white paper around Challenges with HealthCare Payers and HyperLedger/Blockchain (target for completion in Q1-2019)
Apply and select a use case for POC and execute a POC
Presentation of the Decision Framework and POC at various events as we progress
We will soon be looking for members who can help with the coding of the POC.
EHR Subgroup
For the next quarter, the subgroup plans to deliver a 10-15 page document describing the following for its EHR blockchain use case:
Benefits of storing/indexing EMRs in blockchain
Impacts for the healthcare ecosystem: patient, providers, care centers, pharmas, payers, authorities, changes in data governance
Incentives, impact on the current patient data economy, use of tokens
Benefits/challenges vs privacy compliance: HIPAA, GDPR
Impact on government regulation
Challenges: EMR fragmentation, standards, interoperability, availability/access to EMRs, Master Patient Index, size of data in transactions
Use of standards: HL7
User interface considerations
Timing for deployment
Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup
!!STEVEN
Participant Diversity
This is a very diverse membership with global representation (including, but not limited to, member participation from England, Canada, and India). The majority of membership represents corporate healthcare entities, though we do regularly see regular (and perhaps increasingly so) participation from smaller healthcare startups.
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