Healthcare is a $7.98 trillion industry that impacts every one of us worldwide. Because of its sheer size, it’s slow, expensive, and resistant to change. Improving the core aspects of the industry — cost and access to care, patient data ownership, and the cost of administrative overhead — creates the best opportunity for real impact to change the lives of billions of patients around the world.
Today, Akash Network and Solve.Care, a blockchain-based healthcare relationship management platform that enables the creation and deployment of digital health networks, are partnering to provide an entirely new way for individuals and organizations to manage their patient healthcare data. By choosing Akash as their primary way to access permissionless compute resources, Solve.Care will be able to decentralize patient data, pioneering blockchain’s integration into healthcare systems with improved security, transparency, and accessibility. This will enable organizations to reduce their administrative overhead without prior technical knowledge and allow patients to regain true ownership of their most important data.
Key Aspects of the Partnership
Solve.Care is focusing on three primary areas of impact as it integrates permissionless Akash compute:
Ownership of patient data. Due to current industry regulations, patient data is required to be kept on file for seven years, often in hyperscalers like Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Google Cloud (GCP). Under this system, the patient doesn’t have sovereignty over their data. On top of this, there is no digital permanence if data and backups are lost, as opposed to blockchain-based solutions which enable data to persist indefinitely.
Reducing administrative overhead for healthcare organizations. The overhead to mail the required Explanation of Benefits (EOB) forms to patients costs healthcare organizations hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Using a Solve.Care node, patients can access these EOB forms without needing paper copies to be sent in the mail — which could reduce administrative costs by an order of magnitude. In addition to the direct savings on EOBs, enterprises also benefit from the reduction in liability that comes with keeping patient data on file. With Care.Nodes running on low cost Akash compute, healthcare providers are able to directly lower their administrative overhead.
Demonstrate how blockchains can serve real-world use cases. Blockchain uniquely enables data ownership to become decentralized in a way that was previously not possible. Reliance on massive centralized healthcare providers has become slow and inefficient. Using blockchain-based nodes to store healthcare data gives patients sovereignty over their medical records and data, empowering them to control who can and can’t access their information.
How the technology behind Akash and Solve.Care’s partnership will operate
Akash enables access to the compute needed to deploy Solve.Care’s proprietary node infrastructure (Care.Nodes) to patients worldwide. Because Akash is a distributed network with compute providers worldwide, Solve.Care can permissonlessly access compute in the regions where their enterprise clients and patients live and receive care.
This provides two key benefits:
- Enterprise care providers can reduce the liability of managing patient data by allowing that data to be stored in the patient’s personal Care.Node — deployed in the region where the patient lives and receives care.
- It significantly reduces the cost of delivering Explanation of Benefits (EOB) documents. Today, printing and mailing these documents to patients can cost upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars. By delivering EOBs directly to patient Care.Nodes, enterprise healthcare providers can reduce their administrative costs by an order of magnitude.
The path forward for decentralized healthcare
This partnership between Akash Network and Solve.Care represents a transformative step forward in the way that healthcare data is managed and accessed. Using Akash’s open network, Solve.Care will be able to directly address critical issues in the healthcare industry around data ownership, efficiency, and transparency. This partnership will enable the creation of Care.Nodes for patients around the world, which allow patient data control to become truly decentralized. It not only places patients in full control of their health data, but also optimizes the delivery of healthcare services by minimizing unnecessary administrative expenses.
In summary, the Akash Network and Solve.Care partnership marks a crucial development in making healthcare more patient-centric, secure, and cost-effective. This initiative sets a new benchmark for the integration of technology in healthcare, making the healthcare industry more open and accessible for all.
To stay informed of the latest developments in this partnership, follow Akash and Solve.Care on X. Stay tuned for a comprehensive technical blog post, which will take a deep dive into the technology behind deploying Care.Nodes on Akash, coming soon.
