Blockchain can make safe healthcare more accessible

[Music] hello everybody let's continue with uh topics related to healthcare and how blockchain is making an impact in the industry now i'm joined by four fantastic professionals in the industry and they will talk about how blockchain can make a safe healthcare can make safe healthcare more accessible alison the stage is yours great thank you so much so hello everyone and uh welcome to the panel discussion on the very relevant topic of how blockchain can make safe healthcare more accessible so we'll kick off today with a quick round of introductions uh to our panel and i'll go first so my name is allison percival i'll be moderating the discussion today and i have been working at merck msd for 12 years in supply chain management and last year i took the leap and joined the exciting world of blockchain and i'm currently leading the order to cash use cases experimenting with blockchain technology and how it can drive efficiency and value to our end-to-end supply chains so now we can move to our panelists for a quick introduction so i'll just uh start off with you dan johnson my name is daniel lovrick i'm the vice president of digital and data solutions at zulic farmer and it's an honor to to be here at the european blockchain convention and be part of this panel discussion today um at zulu pharma we've been on our blockchain journey for around about four years and really it all started uh to try and and look at um in the in the areas or the regions that we we actually distribute and uh counterfeit medicines and substandard medicines they pose a huge bet to patient safety and so we were determined to try and find a solution to combat these these challenges and really see how we could build an end-to-end product traceability uh solution and and so together that's what we've been able to do so far we've we've built a a solution an ecosystem um that that allows our patients to be able to uh be empowered to uh scan and um have a degree of confidence that a product that they're about to take is a genuine product so great great to be on this panel today great thank you uh jan if you want to introduce yourself please yeah hi everybody thank you for having me it's a real honor to be a part of this exciting panel my name is john watman i'm working for biopharmaceuticals in my day job my responsibility is digital lead supply chain track and trace so i'm an i.t guy by profession and the other side of my life is pharma ledger and in this in particular the product crucibility work stream which i'm leading uh in the team with five other major pharma makers um talking about blockchain uh in the end as daniel was rightly kicking off we started to gather this journey uh some years ago in this in this part experimenting from from buyer and we came to the conclusion okay blockchain is team sport so in order to experiment it's it's absolutely uh important to have a consortium on the start which is meaningful in the sense in our first trial we did this uh following the source make deliver uh paradigm with cmos packaging providers and zulic as our distribution partner in asia and this in the end was a very positive experience and took it took us into the pharma ledger project where we are a significant part and thank you for having me and i'm looking forward for an interesting discussion great and uh heather hello thanks alison um it's it's a great honor to be here today my name is heather flannery i'm the founder and chief executive officer of consensus health that's spelled with a y at the end consensus health is a commercially independent spin-off of consensus that you may be familiar with an organization that has made substantial contributions to the adoption of of blockchain uh at an engineering level and a thought leadership level and consensus health is focused on building next generation uh critical infrastructure for humanity that includes but it but spans beyond blockchain technologies and uh personally i i'm i'm incredibly honored and humbled to work at the intersection of my my conviction and my passion and my organization's ability to partner and contribute to the advancement of our industry it's a it's an amazing and exciting time right now um i also serve in uh several volunteer leadership capacities including sharing a standard in development at ieee chairing the blockchain task force at the health information management system society chairing the enterprise ethereum alliance health interest group and a wide range of areas looking at how to drive and overcome barriers to adoption of this this potentially extremely transformative family of technologies it's great to be here looking forward to a terrific conversation amazing so um really feel privileged to have such an experienced panel here to have this discussion so one quick note before we jump into the questions to the audience if you could as with the other panels please pop your questions into the chat we will dedicate some time at the end of the discussion to to answer those so the the first foundational question really is for all of our panelists here so the three of you um and it is you know why do you believe that blockchain technology can make safe healthcare more accessible and if you could please elaborate and tell us about ignit existing initiatives and use cases in your companies and or examples of complete implementations that are driving towards this this vision i don't know if dan you want to start or oh yeah no problem at all um yeah i think for julie probably what we've been seeing in the last few years is really our pharma clients across asia facing a couple of challenges um one is around counterfeit medical products and the other is around i guess damaged due to to heat exposure um and so really zulu farmer we have a mission it's to make healthcare more accessible and and uh this due to this panel you know making safe healthcare more more accessible um and so really we wanted to explore how we could best use a digital solution to address these these growing concerns and i think young alluded to it you know we started this journey before plus years ago um and uh working alongside jan on a few different or a proof of concept and then really how can we take that one step further um and so really we implemented a solution called easy tracker it's it's an app it's a track and trace based on blockchain uh really to allow products end-to-end visibility um as i say as i mentioned running on blockchain and the whole idea is to really ensure that it's from an authorized source and then from there can we build on more and more kind of um use cases and one of those was was around other products being stored in the right temperature conditions obviously this is very important when you think about covert 19 vaccines would have to be started at super low temperatures and same with a lot of these cold chain products um around vaccines and so the the the kind of the integrated solution really what it does is it connects farmer manufacturers healthcare practitioners and patients um via the blockchain um to really be able to access product verification uh seamlessly uh real time through to a mobile phone uh through their smartphones and so um what we've been able to do is kind of now we have all of our all the products so we're starting to bring all the products um registered onto the blockchain network we get them serialized and then we can track them all the way through end to end so we know where that particular product came from that particular box and and where it ended up and handling what temperature conditions and and and how it was actually delivered there so for a patient uh you know they're now integral and they're involved in this this whole experience anybody with a smartphone is now empowered to scan and verify if their products are genuine and safely stored before it reaches them and obviously this then builds confidence in the product and and we start to address any kind of questions or concerns around patient safety for healthcare practitioners and and and kind of our pharma manufacturers it also helps them to take a proactive role in self safeguarding patient health and and we're also seeing a lot of operational processes that can be improved by by using by having this end-to-end visibility of where inventory is at any point in time and being able to integrate into into other systems and also give kind of really deep insightful analytics and insights um and so this really helps everybody who's connected to this this ecosystem they become better equipped to fight fakes improve gaps in in their operations or even around being able to to ensure that that call chain uh processes have been adhered to so yeah really this is a kind of a real uh live case it's we sometimes get asked this is a pilot approved concept it's it's something that we've launched into four markets in in in asia so far with with the another three or four plan for next year and users it's available in app store users downloading it uses scanning scanning products and it's doing everything we hoped it would it would do so showing up where we see products in places where they shouldn't be or or counterfeits actually coming into the market great very powerful applicable and you know impactful for for patients and the ecosystem partners um jan if you want to maybe answer the the question in the work you're doing a pharma ledger investigation sure sure happy to do so first of all building a bit on on on on daniel's point sir so we are in a bridge situation on the one hand side we are on the logistic sides which is my core business on the other hand as a drug maker our fundamental interest is how how we can can be faster in design designing and developing drugs on the one hand side and the other part reaching out having a better communication better contact the patient so these are the two things that we have starting with the first thing is yes product is getting more complex every day the regulation is turning uh every day more complex so from that point of view we need means to put all the relevant partners on one sheet of music in the sense and the promise of blockchain apart from that everybody has his copy on its own to be sure that this is the thing that i have posted to the world it's also the possibility to open up the information to to partners that we haven't envisioned in the first place in in logistics it's very clear customs is one one part of this uh logistics providers and so on so there is an endless list of potential stakeholders that could be involved in this in this and the access will provide new information and in the end has the potential to to provide a lot of efficiencies to the complex [Music] ecosystem and on top of the safe square miles of of rainforest for all the paperwork that can be saved so that's the logistics part of of the metal on the other side we see the potentials for for everything where we have the the potential to to involve patients in the sense first of all of course in the in the in the uh in the rim of uh clinical trials where i'm not the hundred percent the axis i have to admit i believe heather will give us some some other insights to this later on but still the the potential that that patients will be able to to to have electronic consent of participating in trials this is already a huge step ahead because if you if you consider the the paper that has been shuffled around in order to do this today this is horrendous right and we're living in the 21st century if you if sometimes it's it's hard to believe that it's really the case right the other part is uh in the in the trials we are we're shuffling around huge tons of data and it would be a great uh leap forward if we could have it that every patient me as a patient let's put it that way will be under control of its own data and share it to to a given clinical trial um in order to make use of it and once this this trial has hopefully successfully been been concluded there is also another secondary usage on these print and this is something this is a part of data gold mine if you like that we are not able to to to access today and i see on this level a lot of potential additional use cases which create lots of values for for patients on the one headset and of course the drug makers on the understand being more fast and using the data appropriately and for various uses on the long time which is today uh not possible because if you if you set up a trial there will be a one-off database for a given given trial and that's will be done all over all over again for every new neutron right so this is a bit the situation that we see and these are the two vertices that we are looking into uh on the one hand side and with pharma ledger majorly on the supply chain side but also the the clinical parts which are very relevant great thank you heather you want to jump in abso absolutely i'm excited to follow uh daniel and jan's points here um i think i'd like to first build on jan's remarks regarding um the implications of of safety and and what that means in our industry um it's certainly a complex idea uh it invokes it evokes cybersecurity for example where a different a different infrastructure model and a different a different kind of data structure that disincentivizes bad actors and criminal actors to to launch attacks at the critical infrastructure that all of humanity depends upon so there's a fundamental safety to the infrastructure itself if we live in a massively digital culture and we exist within a digital health system so that that is that is fundamental um the integrity of the data itself both for research and for mainstream medicine that all of us rep rely upon for clinical decision making and for for acting with agency and dignity in the care of our own selves and our families and our uh our communities the uh safety of course implicates can you trust the drug that is being put into your body that it is not counterfeit that it is not it is not uh the both the provider and the patient and the pharmacist and the system can trust that the treatments and interventions that are being delivered are in fact as they're purported to be so this is a major danger zone for all of all of society so it has been rightly and urgently prioritized across uh across these infrastructures but safety also implicates a new category of of risk which is increasingly artificial intelligences are deployed across our healthcare system and those those ais were trained with data where'd the data come from how do we know how it was trained and are we sure that there isn't bias built into the training data itself accidental unintentional but institutionalized bias that actually worsens instead of improves upon the very substantial divides that we have around uh health health access digital inclusion and and more so blockchain in that respect is a part of a story that can change the way that that health care has been in the process of being digitized and unfortunately we've had unintended consequences where we've we've left behind large portions of the human population as affluent populations have access improving access to healthcare and those in poverty or on the edge often have the system isn't designed for them and we have a we have a new set of opportunities and in our field my esteemed co-panelists and many others are all working together on initiatives to drive uh digital inclusion agency dignity privacy and safety in all of its many contexts and uh blockchain technology touches so many different parts of that uh so it's um yeah those are some preliminary thoughts on access and safety over to you right and did you want to comment on any of the existing implementations or work in progress uh consensus health is is driving in this area uh sure sure we we have uh two major initiatives underway uh one is focused on a municipally scaled community care intervention that has blockchain at its foundation called health utility grids and those are those are to represent communities and individuals and create care care coordination and integration of resources public and private sector around particular communities health health utility grids were just recently announced as a brand new endeavor but you'll be seeing um lots of progress and we are excited about interfacing health utility grids with more enterprise centric initiatives in order to bring to correct for some of the asymmetry between the an individual's ability to engage and what governments and enterprises are able to assemble so it's it's uh i'm very excited about that and then we have a um in the united states an endeavor focused on uh us veterans and their families and caregivers called vichy which is i conquered in latin and uh and we are uh seeking to rapidly address some very long-standing and difficult matters in u.s veterans health as a as a population where where complex transitions in care and complex care payment models make it very very difficult to create cohesive uh cohesive and and positive patient experiences across organizational boundaries there's very high very high rates of of depression and suicidality um substance use disorder um and and uh so those those two initiatives are are going to be aligned and going strong in 2022 as well as supporting our our partners across across the industry in the ways that consensus health engages great thank you and um i think that's a good segue you know until the next questions which is kind of moving into how do we drive this forward and you all alluded to it um that you know blockchain is really a team sport especially i mean across all industries but in particular the healthcare ecosystem so in your you know opinion to what extent do you see blockchain being implemented by the entire ecosystem being pharmaceutical companies distributors clinics hcps what are the barriers to adoption and how can we activate an accelerated top and to ensure we're able to realize all those benefits that you guys just articulated i need to take that one i can i can check the start um i think um excuse me i think ever heather alluded to or spoke about really the data protection and security i guess the top of mind now um obviously blockchain this empowers patients they can create but create immutable and secure mechanism to share their information and records across the the ecosystem um you can then start to obviously tag on connecting iot devices giving real-time measurements updating doctors immediately and i can suppose that uh zulu what we we tried to do or we look looking to do is really to connect all ecosystem partners effectively and through blockchain um and we looked at a few different use cases you know we started up off we'll how can we use this to kind of speed up a product recall process um and from there what about reporting adverse events and then from there how about tracking trace of uh of particular products and being able to tag those patients to an individual pack of medicine and and vaccine that's been taken so that's the kind of one side then we've looked at then following from there then the natural kind of evolution is how do we integrate this with clinic systems and so that to be able to use the this end-to-end visibility with the blockchain network to analyze demand and inventory of stock and when when stocks are running out you know be able to trigger an alert or actually trigger an auto replenishment so that they can the reorder processes it becomes seamless it sounds very simple but at the moment you just can't do that because there's no there's no visibility of where stocks are at any any point in time and then from there can you also then start to be able to send alerts to make sure that products are inside the village gates and so that we don't start having to um until kind of waste waste products that are out there um i think and the farm ledger team they've been looking at um how to look at e-product information again i think that's it's a great initiative really how do we get rid of this paper and move to to digital and everybody does virtually everything on there on their smartphones so how can we how can we use blockchain to underpin that so you can you can get the most up-to-date um literature on a particular product um and then i guess if we can connect all these partners in the ecosystem really what we've then been able to do is offer really high quality patient care and service and and also it is a kind of an optimization and time and effort and human error i guess that we can start to eliminate from from the entire from the entire process um and obviously patients they now they now play a a key role uh in this whole ecosystem and they're in control of of what they they want to share or not share and in this in this journey so i guess um for us that's what we really see how we can connect everybody i guess barriers to adoption is is depends where where we are you know and in asia it's a little bit more difficult because um we have a lack of serialization in the countries that that um that we as zooliga are part of and there's no real collective push at the moment like the u.s or europe to to bring serialization in or mandate it so really makes it very hard to to to be able to track and trace at a product level individual level um where that particular product is is gone um and so if we can get that then it makes life far easier i guess um the other thing is the area is really around how do you make this this open and interoperable um i think it's key uh how do you make it as easy um for any party to join a blockchain network so no barriers to entry uh cloud agnostic i guess even blockchain agnostic how can we make sure that that anybody can can join um and and that is an open unopened network with no owner in effect so true dis distributed ledger um and i guess the final one i think is is really there's a maybe a bit of a mind shift uh mindset shift that needs to to take place i guess um how do we how do we patients and citizens how do you you get a message across that sharing and centralizing data is kind of in their interests and as long as they're they're kind of the custodians of that data um i don't think we're quite there yet um but i think if we can if we get through some of these key um kind of barriers uh i think well on the way you know do you mind if i jump in and react to that i just um i agree with you completely daniel and there's one other barrier to adoption i'd like to highlight that may not be um that's not obvious or self-evident uh to just the world at large and it's that regardless of how interoperable or broad how many different protocols are supported how many different clouds are supported we are talking about a new class of infrastructure and you said yourself daniel that no one owns it well then if no one owns it how does it get capitalized who invests in it where does the money come from to fund this enormous new public good that also is in the commercial interests of many many enterprises who want to achieve their health care aims and then if it becomes the trust layer literally the trust layer the cyber security layer the identity layer of the of a new emerging digital health system how do we underwrite that risk who writes the insurance policy who who underwrites it who owns that so so so the legal entity structure that can house these things is unique to each jurisdiction but needs to exist the governance model of of um of a system with without con without controls in the sense that health care and life sciences means when when we say that the these are major challenges that are i would say culturally antithetical between between the idea of of web of open web three and what that looks like and what it takes to control and manage risk and bear liability uh in any sector of health care and life sciences so there there's there's a cultural mindset difference and there are problems in capital structure in legal orientation in liability insurance governance and uh that that's a major focus area of ours and uh but but i think one of the most interesting and controversial sets of discussions about barriers and i would lastly make the point that if that question were to have been posed to us even two years ago we would have said that that there were still major technological barriers and and blockers i my opinion is that we're past that point we'll continue to mature and evolve the technology absolutely but now our biggest blockers our structural cultural legal capital structure et cetera thanks uh yeah it looks like you look like you under react or unmute sorry that was the mute button um yeah from the pharmacy perspective building on on heather's comments um we i do not want you to to focus on the use cases that's more on the broader perspective what would be the next thing because the use cases have been selected from a consortium of 29 members 12 of them pharma companies now we have two additional associated pharma companies on it we have clinical trials uh companies we have patient forums on it we have universities on it which particularly uh support in the question on on gdpr and those fundamental rights of of our patients in this so from the from this point of view we have a very meaningful consortium on this part but still we see there are lacking elements and apart from from from the use cases and the technological part the the consortium is a key element and the question is how to drive this is a very interesting which we are deeply uh discussing these days this is one of the most fundamental tasks for the far malaysia project of 2022 first of all to to to have a look and where is the capitalization part so what could be the benefit how benefits can be distributed and we believe more in in the question of how can we taken in order to to invest into better services to our patients that's that's the point um this is all all a work in progress so it's very early to to to go into the into this lines and the other question which is out there is always the question on the new oil data is the new oil and how how uh who owns it as as heather is rightly saying and how can we we build on this right and the other part is this is one of the the comments i saw um the question is okay so whereas my contribution is assuming that that i'm participating with my data where can i see it back right so okay if we have a blockchain in a more generalized form i'm on control of my data and can see how it contributes to just given parts this will be a bit more complicated and heather will definitely uh detail on this maybe later on the question in if we are talking about artificial intelligence and training for instance neural networks so what is the impact of the data of jan wardman in this case in order to train a given given uh neural network which give us new insights to to let's say given uh indications diseases and so ever so that's that's an interesting question uh where we are all working on in order to to get these these kinds of transparency done europe in this part uh has in its legislation some frameworks and this is so the initial training sets have to be uh presented at any time in order to understand how the initial setup of a neural network will be tied together this is one element the other part as said is the technological part are we really able first of all to open up the information for given additional stakeholders talking about logistics that's of course the regulator regulators did we provide the product at the right temperatures every time so if if they do some some uh random evidence how industry is working they might be interested to look into these things so from the technology part is are we really open enough in order to make this this happen uh faster than than in in the past because in the past what happened is uh in order to to incorporate new stakeholders you create a second system which takes the first thing and builds on top of that the requirements of the new stakeholders and in the end what we that what we kids love to do so we are piling wooden blocks one after each other and then you have those those towers which crash at a given time and the this will be interesting question if we really master this if we can can leave it in order to stay on this but on a flat basis which allows us to incorporate those new new uh stakeholders the other question will be not only the this to open up to new stakeholders in the use case uh at hand it's also the question will we be able to to provide new services on top of that so open up this this network in order to to build new services on top of existing ones and being open to third parties that will be another interesting question that we are looking into um how we could do this what we can possibly do is it and of course there are lots of technology questions how we can support this on the long run right just to give you one one flavor what we're doing in farmer ledger uh is we are bringing together four different buttocks of technology if you like first of all blockchain being blockchain agnostic so in order to make sure that we do not leave data which is which is compromising on the blockchain itself we have created to rely on uh open distributed storage units so this is the technology that we are using in order to have this on offline in the sense and maintain the proof of the authenticity of the data and the correctness of the data on the blockchain itself so so there's a double double access to it first of all we have the fingerprint which is the authenticity part and of course we have a link which takes you to the system of records which will provide the data if you are authorized to this part so by this time we are always sure that we have these things separated and will be an optimum so that's the one element blockchain opendsu on top of this comes all the bls decks like epcis the coding standards around two-dimensional barcodes this is one and this and the the fourth element of course are digital identities to have this completely digitally enabled and the new thing of armature if you like it's it's not a b2b thing where we started off for instance in our our uh traceability work since we are talking mostly about b2b topics um but we will have b2p as i call it business to patient or farmer to patient if you like this context and this will be a real challenge in order to to master this on the long run and i said it will be the proof of the partying uh if we would be able to open up the network provide put new services on and have the authorization on this uh to make the session end being open enough technologically and and from the governance perspective to to uh allow other parties to build on on these services that are already out there right great thank you and i think to continue the conversation and the direction on you know not necessarily the blockchain technology but that data ecosystem and data pipeline that having that integrated ecosystem enables now what are your thoughts on how blockchain and that data can enable more patient-centric healthcare and also what sort of experience can patients expect to to to realize by sharing their data what are their incentives to to share their data why should they why should they be on board to to do that and how can this data really drive forward more patient-centric health care go ahead heather i think you want to jump in there yeah the the first thing i'd i'd like to do is challenge all of us we we speak about data in the possessive the patient's data uh but they are often the data subject they don't know where their data is they don't have access to it and they don't they have no custody over it and presently they're not part of the very robust economy involved in the exchange and purchase of health information so we we talk about we purport that patients have a role in the the governance and the curation the aggregation the uh the monetization of information about them but we still have a ways to go of of empowering uh empowering data subjects to understand what information about them even exists how it could how it could be placed under their control or governance at all and what that what that would mean uh for both for clinical scientific health economic and other contexts so so we've in our industry at the intersection of blockchain and healthcare enterprises and governments largely have been working through the many myriad problems of how and barriers to engage this and i think 2022 is the year that we really begin to activate the data subjects educate empower and put in their hands tools that allow them for the first time to have the earliest experiences of being included in a new economy for health data and when we when we describe um health data we we must realize if you're just talking about a piece of information that information if it lives in the enterprise i t systems of a pharmaceutical company or in the enterprise i t systems of a public health authority or a provider organization or the same information lives under some infrastructure that is controlled by the data subject each of those have distinct governance and legal parameters it's the same information and that information is often copied and extended and de-identified and re-identified and normalized and transformed and transformed again and what what we end up with what we have today is a very um a very opaque off-market data economy where the data assets themselves are i think by comparison to future data assets if we envision what do data assets look like in the future what we have today would be the equivalent of junk bonds they are they are we so so if you if you go five years from now when we're be we're able as an industry to use blockchain infrastructures to control provenance to wrap confirmed identity in packages of data or fine-grained consents with jurisdiction-specific parameters along with data that has its supply chain thinking applied to its entire provenance and lineage what that means it has massive implications for the future of achieving the vision of precision medicine personalization achieving the vision of a learning health system and it has enormous implications for what what data as a new asset class functioning in a in a new financialized economy that includes the data subject these are these are all major trends that are that are going to be emerging in in the in the short term i mean we're not we're not talking about 20 years from now we're talking about we're talking about pretty much coming up so and linking into that do you you know do you think that just simply having owning the data is a sufficient incentive for this water participation or do you think that there's more you know incentive incentives required for citizens patients to to participate in this future data economy oh well i i know jan wanted to comment but i would certainly suggest that that is a necessary incentive but not at all sufficient uh the real incentive is on the health and well-being of every individual in their family yeah that's the real and go ahead john yeah thank you thank you for bringing up this this was a bit my line because in the end it's the question on the on the various aspects of interest that we have first of all we see every time more educated patients if you like so so they they have questions and they are able to answer them and they would love to have those answers right in their hands and blockchain technology as it works gives us huge in in access to to those kind of information uh via simple mobile phones right so so that's that's the promise in this you do not need a huge enterprise architecture in order to to make this accessible to to uh to patients coming back to the initial quote accessible uh healthcare if you like so the barriers from the technology part are very low uh in order to bring us in now comes the question what do we do with it so first of all as heather was rightly i was in it's the interest is this something which which will heal me and not bringing me into into trouble and we all know about the consequences of fake drugs applied to humans let's call it erroneously this is not the case we all know it there are no no sufficient words in order to to pre to formulate the regret on on those uh criminal acts right so that's one part so in order to be as an informed patient to follow all the relevant information and and process them on your end right for instance in pharma ledger we're looking not only into epis electronic product information we're also looking into into more means of of the security in counterfeit protection so so you can can scan the pack and hidden hidden uh characteristics which are in all the different maker specs can be evaluated by giving the confidence to to to our patient that this is not no fake right so that's that's the first part the other part will be on the long run so so what is if taking the bitcoin question um i get a bitcoin for solving the riddle for the consensus that's that's the idea in the background of of bitcoin and very few words so the question is what is the equivalent of mining in this question and i believe the part is the participation of uh sharing the information this is part of the the mining uh and this the starting point we have to to still a long way to to uh translate this in something something meaningful which will last on a longer period because the short term it's it could be relatively easy it could be the rewards uh as we see in in clinical trials but this is just the short term short term initiative the long term part is more important and and the other part is how the contribution of given data is influencing uh ai for instance so from that point of view there are a lot of new questions that we have to to to answer uh and as uh heather is rightly saying this will not not be dissolved in the next 20 years so this is more urgent as said farmer ledger is is working uh on this in in the context of their use cases but also we are looking a bit ahead on this on this this point in order to make this happen and more attractive for those individuals which are which with a let's say deeper wish to insights from how medicine will be built right heather did you want to comment back just just briefly um i i would i would love to also highlight for the audience that our industry today is built on a first principle that data must be exchanged between parties in order for workflows to flow whether they're clinical or scientific or or regulatory data has to move from a to b for anything to happen and a party has to get custody of data put it under a governance model that they trust their trust model then they can perform analytics against that data then they can use that to inform decisions but until they get it and they control some copy of the information and put it under their own trust model today by and large it cannot be used whether you're talking about a regulator a pharma company a provider a payer it matters not the data has to move copies of copies of copies and every time it's copied and moved it has to be transformed it moves under a different regulatory model and more cyber security risk is incurred so that actually our our whole policy and regulatory environment is built around those first principles but those are no longer actually the technological barrier that we have the emerging paradigm that that that i i firmly believe is happening very very quickly is one where we can perform those analyses we can we can conduct inferences we can make predictions we can provide derived data without ever moving or even exposing the source data and that's true for competitively sensitive information of enterprises and sensitive health information of individuals under their own custody it can be made available for analytical use in a completely privacy preserving way without being exposed or moved or transformed and that that is a structurally revolutionary idea that really it is enabled by blockchain but it's entirely about what happens off chain and at a at an infrastructural level so this uh when an individual is consenting to their data being used for example in the future they're going to have to be educated about whether that means their data is being exposed or shared or whether it's being used to to run a query to uh to to uh to match against a clinical trial inclusion exclusion criteria for example which may not require exposing a single thing to anyone so that that's a it's a very different idea and daniel i'm sorry i think i cut you off oh no i was just going to add on to your point i think if what you said is is exactly spot on you know if we can bring together blockchain and layer on top of that confidential computing then i think uh that that is where we need to to head towards it's something that we've been kind of dipping our toe into uh and seeing how the two can coexist and come together but i think everything you said yeah it really uh it kind of resonates with what we're looking to do as well particularly uh this this question on on providing the data for a given purpose under a given regulatory framework for instance clinical studies for uh for ema or fda there is always differences so from that point of view this is part of the of the inefficiencies in the system that we have which costs us uh patients a lot of money because in the end the patient will pay it or better the the pay the payer if we are talking about uh health systems like the european one or the canadian one so from that point of view this is where where we still have the potentials which farmer ledger in this end is looking for in order to to make again health care more accessible to to uh patients in this sense because as i was uh alluding to so data will be shared so it's it's a view on something which is already uh existing i can can control whom i will donate or or provide the rate the right to read it to that's the first thing me as a patient on the other hand i can exactly see how we this information will be consumed by others right and this will be uh completely new access to this kind of uh thinking that we do not have today right yes there are still some technological uh challenges in the end uh we have to make the meaning of the data has to be clarified this is something which is not so easy in this sense there are ways to do so and there are a lot of different ai uh schools which are working on these these topics in order to make data meaningful for given purposes if you like right but first of all ending the tourism of data in this sense and and providing security and and the clear immune mutability of that to make it trusted is a very important leap forward where blockchain brings in a new quality which which is unequaled in other things that we saw in the past from this part and i believe this is this is what we all uh striving for to to make this uh to open up this this new paradigm for the sake of us in in the role of of patients because in the end we will all uh hit someday some some uh diseases and we would always uh expect that we find the means to to to uh heal the patients out there and the other part is as heather was also rightly uh alluding to is we have to make this more accessible for the rest of of the world because covet shows it very brutally unless we are not providing the vaccine for the entire humanity we will be washed again by another wave of of new uh new uh uh virus variants in in this sense uh which will move up and down the planet from north to south south to to to north and this will be endless if you like so so from that point of view there's a lot of things a lot of pressure on the industry how we can answer these these questions in order to to make sure that the survival of our race because if we if we look into into the fatalities that we have with ebola and those kind of diseases cobot is still relatively harmless if you like right so the the infection rate of of cobalt combined with the fatality of ebola that will kill us uh will erase us from from this planet that's for sure right thank you and i know unfortunately we only have three minutes left but it was a really great conversation it went by very quickly um so we did actually address a number of the questions that were added by the audience based on you know with with the conversation so that's good maybe one uh one final one that you all touched on a little bit is how can you know when we have this data data ecosystem and infrastructure at our fingertips enabled by blockchain how can then ai contribute um to that to that patient experience and access to health so if you want to answer that final question and maybe have a final remark for for the to close out the panel i'll i'll kick that one off so so so quickly uh our industry in healthcare and life sciences has long since prioritized ai and its potential it is a top priority in every sector uh if you speak with ai practitioners what you will learn is that that the the core computer science it continues to advance quickly but we are blocked in realizing its potential in mainly sourcing quality data not just the quantity but the right data to to be able to to utilize that and then uh that right data means data that is diverse that is representative of the human population and that can be uh um trusted so an a.i uh can can unfortunately institutionalize the bias of the data that was used to train it not necessarily human bias but uh but uh but a systemic after effect of of the long-term consequences of vulnerable populations having limited access to care therefore their data isn't represented in the systems effectively you use that data to train ais those ais are optimized to serve affluent populations and not the vulnerable it is it is unintentional but tragic as a consequence and uh we have the potential to source high quality the right data at the right time that can be trusted and correct for bias and to and to to unblock the potential of ai in health care because of the implications of a blocked a blockchain trust layer yeah and building on it first of all ai is all about big data more data in order to to have better insight to to the the specific condition of a patient and so on so for today we see huge silos of information which are completely locked and not accessible and the the real promise here is that we are able to unlock them in order to to to make it accessible to ai and by this come to better models which allow us better insights on on on diseases and will help us to stay live a more healthy life and if you like so from that point of view it's it's the the opening up siloed information is one of the major things that we see in this in this area which is unprecedented from my perspective that's great maybe i started you know i completely agree i think there's much more of an expert in in this area than i am i swear certainly around the eye but i agree that unlocking these these data basically gain access to this this end-to-end view of the data that that's key and from there we can then yeah we will with ai i guess we're just going to be able to um super accelerate uh all of the insights that we'll get but i think the key is having this foundation layer and blockchain is is really helps us to achieve that great well i think we're over over time so thank you so much for the great conversation and i know we could really continue much longer but we have to move on but uh happy to be part of this panel today and all the best for 2022 and your ongoing work to realize the uh increased access to health care for for the industry so interesting discussion thank you very much to all participants yeah i guess at the end of the day if we all share more health data we all win right so maybe the idea is how do we make it right thank you very much again and i invite all attendees to join us for the last session of the health care track and yeah see you in a bit great thank you bye thank you [Music]