[Proposal] Hopr Med dApp

Problem: Currently many medical companies (hospitals, doctors offices, labs, etc.) use completely different software systems to keep private medical data encrypted. This serves the purpose for keeping sensitive medical information private within individual clinics or hospitals or health systems. However, people often are moving between different doctors and hospital systems for differing levels of care (primary care doctors, emergency room medicine, specialists, surgeries, etc.) Because of this, doctor’s offices, hospitals, health systems often share data with each other in the most antiquated ways including physically receiving patient data through the physical mail, fax, or CD (you remember those). They do this to maintain privacy of medical records.

Proposal: What if all of these medical systems could trust a decentralized application to transfer sensitive medical data across an application that would allow these files to be downloaded and uploaded with complete privacy. Hopr Med dApp would be the solution to this industry wide problem. No more would doctor’s offices and hospitals go through the tedius work of receiving physical medical data and scanning or entering the information into their own internal encrypted systems. Instead every medical office could download and sign in to the Hopr Med dApp and transmit sensitive medical information completely encrypted with a push of the button. Upload and Download encrypted medical information between offices without the use of fax, snail mail, or cd.

Use Case:

This would serve a great need for private data transfer between different medical data systems. Having a third party private application like Hopr Med App would make it easy for medical systems not only share data but get on board. Rather than mailing or faxing or writing data to a CD they would be able to dowload the dApp and communicate using Hoprs node system. These medical systems would pay for this service which in turn would be converted to hopr tokens to be distributed to the node runners. The main intended audience for this would be in the medical field, but it does not mean it could not later be extended to other use cases for transmission of data using the Hopr protocol.

How would this benefit Hopr protocol: The problem this dApp would solve is an industry wide problem and would allow Hopr as an organization and the protocol itself to take center stage in the ultimate protection of sensitive medical data. Although Hopr has already started in this area it has been mostly with internal data systems rather than an industry wide accessible dApp. I believe this would be the more easily adopted technology for the medical industry. Currently most medical organizations have their own encryption programs they use for the entire organization. To adapt their current programs is a tougher sell than to offer to fix an issue without having to change their organizations programming. Instead of a huge hospital changing how their data is transferred internally (big ask) this would be understood by the industry to solve a huge problem they all have externally (much smaller ask). The adoption of the protocol would be substantially larger with this proposal and therefore would benefit the protocol, the Hopr organization, the node runners, and investors.

The dApp Itself: The dApp itself would need to have an accessible sign in for most operating systems and an on ramp and off ramp to the hopr protocol. I am not a coder so I don’t know how helpful I could be in imagining this area of what is possible for the dApp.

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wonderful idea @maessedai - I think there’s at least one other similar proposal in the same direction.

Thank you for responding @SCBuergel ! Our proposals are similar but I would point out we see the primary problem as different. My response to the other medical idea for the metadata problem is here:

I would also add something to the video you linked in response to his idea. It seemed broadly as a use case scenario within the medical systems themselves rather than solving a transmission issue that also encrypts metadata. Might I suggest that a medical app built on top of hopr (probably on the transmission side of the app) that could be broadly used between different medical businesses has a greater use case than just encrypting metadata between internal systems. One of the major issues is all these medical companies and offices and hospitals are using different systems to encrypt medical information internally and solving their metadata issue is worthwhile but solving the transmission issue between the systems, seems to me, to be a broader more easily accessible use case for those who are less tech savvy. My wife is a physician and she might not see a great need for metadata encryption within the system they use (epic). However she would definitely see the need for an app that would use hopr to solve transmission between outside systems. It doesn’t take much technical explanation to say, “wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to mail, or fax, or writes cds of medical data and could trust an application to be even more private than sending information within your own system.” Do you see the distinction I’m attempting to make?

thanks for the clarification @maessedai - that makes sense to me and I see the difference in general vs specific purpose infrastructure

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The actual patient data would be in the encrypted payload moving between the two systems. There would be no patient data contained in the metadata of that transaction. The metadata would simply show that two medical systems are sharing data. Is that a privacy risk?

The person must give the permission to use his data by another doctor or organisation. Not for everyone. It might be the mobile app like DSS.

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Hospitals now-a-days are just big corporations that strong-arm private doctor offices into joining their network. When that happens, the opt-out scenario that was intended to give the patient a choice becomes a moot point.

Very nice. Thanks for posting this. It’s a great area for HOPR to explore, I think.

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This is definately one of the most important niche where data privacy matters. Data transfer between medical facilities, doctor-patient should be safe. Hopr already involved in Med so continue work in this field could have very good outcome.
Thank you for proposal!

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Thank you for the offer. I think it deserves attention and it would be cool to implement it on the basis of HOPR

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