Medixserve Philippines - Most Innovative Startup of the Year
Name of Organization / Company: Medixserve Philippines, Pasig City, NCR, Philippines
Category: Most Innovative Startup of the Year - Business Product Industries
Entry Title: The Electronic Medical Records (EMR) System and Use Cases for Blockchain Technology
Essay
As a tech startup that began its operations in 2018, mediXserve has seen traction in the areas of information technology, product design and development, and research and development.
Innovation On Product Design and Development: Blockchain
In the Philippines, facilities and providers in the healthcare industry still rely on paper-based records. When mediXserve was set up by its two founders, the vision was clear: to move healthcare providers toward the more-superior digital record-keeping system and to up the ante by turning to one of the newest technologies: blockchain.
mediXserve is one of the first heath tech companies (if not the first) to adopt the blockchain technology in the Philippines.
Considering that personal data protection is becoming a core concern, blockchain as a technology is a solution to the problem on silo-ed databases in healthcare. It has the potential to give patients access to their own medical records regardless of the medical facility where they had their tests done or where their doctors are affiliated with.
Using Hyperledger Fabric, which is one of the Hyperledger projects of a consortium of known companies and hosted by Linux Foundation, mediXserve has created its production-ready blockchain that will serve as the underlying platform for myLifeEMR, its electronic medical records (EMR) system.
On Research and Development: A University-based Blockchain Lab
Because the blockchain technology is new both in the Philippines and globally, mass acceptance of the benefits of the technology is key in producing use cases. To create this “village” of early adopters, mediXserve has partnered with Ateneo University, one of the Philippines’ premier schools, and set up the country’s first university-based blockchain research lab called AMBERLab.
As a joint initiative with Ateneo University, AMBERLab helped develop the curriculum for an elective subject on the blockchain technology. It also accepts research proposals on the use of blockchain for social good.
On Information Technology: Data Privacy-Compliant EMR System
In the Philippines, the startup’s EMR system conforms with the country’s data privacy requirements by giving patients the rights to their data and making sure that sharing of records are permission-based. Morever, myLifeEMR is one of the e-health solutions officially certified by Philhealth—the manager of the national insurance program—to comply with the latter’s standard insurance claims transmission requirements.
myLifeEMR is used in 34 municipalities in two administrative regions. It’s greatest impact is in public healthcare, particularly on the country’s vulnerable groups such as the poor.
The predecessor of myLifeEMR was built to cater to the needs and projects of the country’s public rural health centers. Some of this e-health solution’s extensions focus on the Department of Health’s key national concerns: tuberculosis, family planning, dengue monitoring, etc.
Also, most rural-based health units still manually encode additional data on their patients’ insurance claims before these are filed with PhilHealth. With technology, however, this process can now be made more efficient. mediXserve’s latest myLifeEMR version—released in 2019—in particular, now makes it possible for rural health centers to automatically pull claims-relevant data from the EMR system and then submit these claims online.
Today, this latest EMR version is not just for public healthcare. mediXserve has made improvements on its earlier version by adding extensions designed for the needs of health providers and patients in the private sector, too.
In less than one year, the company was able to roll out the EMR system’s three editions: myLifeEMR as SaaS, as mobile app (April 2019), and as an installation in a portable device. It now has 319,000 medical records. The number has grown by an average of 79% in the past two years.
LINKS:
URL 1: www.medixserve.com
URL 2: https://mylifeemr.com/
URL 5: https://www.bworldonline.com/medixserve-builds-blockchain-unified-medical-records-system/
URL 6: http://www.ateneo.edu/ls/sose/sose/news/ateneo-and-medixserve-launch-blockchain-facility-amberlab
URL 7: https://www.facebook.com/MediXserve/videos/450927325431114/
URL 8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRDgf4XQBN8&feature=share