Hyperledger HC-SIG Half-Year Report

Special Interest Group

Healthcare Special Interest Group (HC-SIG)

HC-SIG Overall Health

General

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.

COVID-19 Response

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 HC-SIG 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 Subgroup continues to meet at a regular pace, and with a great deal of membership involvement. The Payer Subgroup has recently "rebooted" and is now seeing a renewal in membership engagement and most recently, acceptance of their pharmacy management project into Hyperledger Labs. The Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup--the newest HC-SIG subgroup–debuted earlier in 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:

Of Merit

Issues

Overall Activity in the Past Half Year

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.

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.

Patient 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 the Patient Subgroup page for details).

Focus to date has been on the group's econsent solution for use in clinical trials. Two Hyperledger frameworks, Sawtooth and Fabric, have been used to develop two equivalent platforms, allowing the comparison of each for the use case of patient data sharing and monitoring in clinical trials. 

Payer Subgroup

The Payer Subgroup had decided to reorganize with 2020. Group has been working with a payer to identify and refine the use case to start a POC. Group will resume starting January 30th, 2020 Meeting. 

June 2020 Update

Payer Subgroup started strong with the re-organization and with a focus on a POC. 

Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup

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:

Planned Work Products

General Group

Continuing activities planned by the general group include:

Patient Subgroup

The plan for the remainder of this year will be to explore and mature the clinical trials 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, Switzerland, Ukranie 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. 

Completed:

Planned:

Payer Subgroup

We have made good progress in 2020 and momentum continues to further deliver value. Below are some planned activities for Payer Subgroup

Planned:

Healthcare Interoperability Subgroup

The HIS team plans to deliver the following work products:

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.