Healthcare Special Interest Group (HC-SIG)
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's clear that meeting topic and/or special guest speaker typically drives attendance numbers.
HC-SIG Subgroups continue to evolve and include:
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, with cadence of this subgroup increasing as the team develops and grows. The Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup--the newest HC-SIG subgroup–debuted earlier this quarter, and continues to establish itself within the HC-SIG community.
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:
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.
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.
The general group holds a regular meeting on a bi-weekly basis on Friday mornings at 0700 (Pacific Time). As a regular agenda item, HC-SIG 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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
The Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup 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:
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 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 from general group coordination activities and governance
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. 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 HIS team plans to deliver the following work products:
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.
None to date.