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Hyperledger HC-SIG Quarterly Report
Special Interest Group
Healthcare Special Interest Group (HC-SIG)
HC-SIG Overall Health
The HC-SIG continues to evolve as it grows its membership participation, and SIG engagement activities. 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. It is 's clear that meeting topic and/or special guest speaker typically drives attendance numbers.
HC-SIG Subgroups
HC-SIG Subgroups continue to evolve and include:
- The Patient/Member Subgroup
- The Payer Subgroup
- The Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup (new)
Both the Patient/Member Subgroup and the Payer Subgroup are meeting regularly and seeing repeat member participation. Patient/Member Subgroup leadership changed hands in June, and so, we expect the with cadence of this subgroup to slow temporarily before it picks up again with renewed momentum and leadershipincreasing as the team develops and grows. The Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup--the newest HC-SIG subgroup--has been delayed in its initial planned debut (leadership had unexpected professional obligations), but is due to come online in mid-to-late Julysubgroup–debuted earlier this quarter, and continues to establish itself within the HC-SIG community.
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. This team was temporarily on hold as leadership stepped away on sabbatical.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, but had again begun working to re-establish a regular cadence.
- Use Case Development Team: charged with the discussion and development of use cases as applicable in the context of the healthcare industry. This is a new HC-SIG ad hoc team for 2019-Q2team held a very productive first meeting, but with a recent change in leadership, has been paused, and will likely resume with new team leadership in place.
- Survey Review Team: our annual review team has again begun preliminary work on the annual HC-SIG membership survey.
- Inactive
- 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.
Of Merit
- Special recognition to HC-SIG member Wendy Charles, for:
- Developing and maintaining a very useful 100+ page academic resource for HC-SIG membership: blockchain article citations Kicking off the HC-SIG Use Case Team, Steven Elliott for kicking off the long-awaited HC-SIG Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup (HIS) with the goal of developing and publishing healthcare use cases implementing blockchain technologies best practicesinvestigating and developing a blockchain architecture that's able to correctly manage syntactic/semantic interoperability within an existing healthcare system
- 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 has requested development access to Hyperledger Labs to move forward with their work efforts in this domain space.
- HCHC-SIG General Meetings hosted the following guest speakers to present on topics relevant to the blockchain technologies in healthcare community:
- Raveesh Dewan, CEO of Joget, Inc.
- Walter Montes, CEO of WorldSibu
- Brian Bentow, Head of Innovation at InstaMed
- Alex Zhovnuvaty, CTO of RideChain, and the creator of Sawtooth Healthcare (managed through Hyperledger Labs)
- Tory Cenaj, Founder and Publisher of Blockchain in Healthcare Today (BHTY)
- David Houlding, CISSP, CIPP and Principal Healthcare Lead at Microsoft CorporationSpiritus CEO Susan Ramonat shared her companies views about the problems faced by health systems, device manufacturers and 3rd party service providers
- Engaged HC-SIG membership with relevant professional opportunities to:
- Participate in the Global Blockchain Benchmarking Study, an empirical study analysing the enterprise blockchain ecosystem, offered through the University of Cambridge
- Work Work with Joe Guagliardo, Partner with Pepper Hamilton LLP, who is interested in developing and teaching has developed an online Blockchain in Healthcare Certification through Jefferson University’s Digital Health Institute of Emerging Health Professionals. Members of the HC-SIG were interviewed as part of this certification program.
Issues
- HC-SIG Chair interview on the Hyperledger.org blog, served to help engage new potential members
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 effortsNone to date.
Overall Activity in the Past Quarter
General Group
The general group 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 and related events), as well as a means for promoting and encouraging the project engagement and accomplishments of each of its HC-SIG subgroups and ad hoc teams.
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Membership and activity across the listserv(healthcare-sig@lists.hyperledger.org) appears to be stable. Listserv membership is currently at ~1050 members. Our chat channel, #healthcare-sig (https://chat.hyperledger.org/channel/healthcare-sig), is seeing semi-regular exchangesonly periodic exchanges.
New this quarter has been the deliberate attempt to extend HC-SIG General Meeting invitations through various social media channels, particularly for HC-SIG guest presentations. It's currently unclear if new membership signups are correlated to these efforts.
Patient/Member 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. We have meetings every other week and we are active in the healthcare Special Interest Group mailing list (see #patient-member-subgroup and for details).
The Patient/Member Subgroup underwent a transition in leadership in January and again in June, so we are again in the midst of a leadership pivot. Since the start of this quarter, subgroup membership has been surveyed on topics to investigate, and we believe to be settling around a work effort that will investigate the workflow of clinical trials utilizing blockchain technologies as Hyperledger Frameworks as a means to harmonize and integrate disparate clinical trial management software (CTMS) solutions. The first focus is the Informed Patient Consent process.
Payer Subgroup
The Payer Subgroup continues to work on the white paper and refine the use cases and to ensure the right use cases are being selected for POCs.
We are working on the Block Chain Blockchain Decision paper that will help payers understand and identify the need for blockchain.
Link to the work-in-progress white paper - Link to White Paper - IN-PROGRESS
. Due to the lack of consistent members joining the meeting, this has slowed down. We are still continuing slowly to keep the momentum
- Hyperledger Meetup group had really good engagement and we are planning for the next meet up in December. More details will be worked out in next meetings
- Group has also started talking about how to engage additional volunteers
Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup
The Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup has no new progress to report at this time. Work is still being done to prepare for the first meetings anticipated to be held towards the end of July. A general announcement will be made with the meeting date, roadmap and agenda.began meetings in August and despite low turnouts for the three meetings continues to be optimistic members will begin to coalesce around the goals of the group. Currently the group is working to:
- Build out a timetable divided into major epics of work so stories can be created to complete the epics.
- Define frameworks capable of representing clinical artifacts from episodes of care.
- Is an episode of care a sufficient unit of work?
- What frameworks are currently being used in the medical domain?
- Are they semantically interoperable?
- What policies of consensus are needed to guarantee assets are semantically interoperable?
- How are assets stored and how are they retrieved?
Planned Work Products
General Group
Continuing activities planned by the general group include:
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 “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 (where the real action is) from general group coordinating coordination activities and governance
Patient/Member 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 can be defined and requirements expressed. A very preliminary architecture is already in place.. 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).
Completed:
- The use case for the Informed Patient Consent process is fixed
- Two high level preliminary solution architectures are already in place
- Regulatory compliance is already discussed and compliance governance is defined
- GitHub repositories have been proposed
- Proposals to two conferences were sent. A lessons learned paper is to be prepared
Payer Subgroup
- We are looking to expand the membership to include team members through our new recruitment approach.
- Starting to finalize POC/Use Case with one of the Vision Payers. They have requested not to be public till they establish the internal plan. Finalize the POC/Prototype for a use case and kick off that effort in this upcoming quarter
Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup
The HIS team plans to deliver the following work products:
- Documentation describing the requirements for a semantically interoperable healthcare ledger including:
- Policies that guarantee interoperability
- Transactions needed to complete an episode of care
- Semantically interoperable Assets that can represent clinical artifacts whether or not the actual artifact is stored on or off chain
- Use-cases that reflect real-life episodes of care
- POC : A functional (minimally viable) blockchain
- Multiple health systems capable of storing / retrieving assets
- Software and system design documentation (SDD)
- Git code repository
- Lessons Learned and next steps
Participant Diversity
This is a very diverse membership with global representation (including, but not limited to, member participation from West Coast US, England, Canada, Switzerland, Hong Kong, 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.
Additional Information
None to date.