The Problem

Introduction

Ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing for all at all ages is important to building prosperous societies. However, despite great strides in improving people's health and wellbeing in recent years, inequalities in healthcare access still persist. More than six million children still die before their fifth birthday each year, and only half of all women in developing regions have access to the health care they need. Epidemics like HIV/AIDS thrive where fear and discrimination limit people’s ability to receive the services they need to live healthy and productive lives.

From Paper Records to EHR to Hippocrates

Standard paper records can be compromised in two ways: by being misplaced or getting stolen (in the unlikely event of a break-in). On traditional EHRs, on the other hand, are at risk due to the increasing prevalence of cyber attacks. Hippocrates distributed technology to store an immutable version of the latest patient passport in a block of the Ethereum Public Ledger, giving no option to the possibility of compromising the sensitive data without reverting the entire Ethereum blockchain.

One of the biggest gripes against traditional paper records is that they are incredibly tedious to access and share. Obtaining a paper record involves first having to find it — possibly within a mound of files — and then either mailing, faxing, or scanning the copies. On traditional EHRs, patients and medical personnel can access information electronically. Hippocrates uses the best of both systems in a decentralized environment by establishing a private offline network using IPFS, managing the state of the medical records through smart contracts and granting access through a physical paper (with a QR code) without the need to use any technology resource from the patient side.

A doctor’s penmanship is often tough to read and decipher, and very easy to misinterpret. Paper records are also notorious for not providing enough space for a doctor to jot everything down legibly. Using Hippocrates, notes can be typewritten without regard for space, reducing concerns regarding illegibility.

Insight of a specific case

Holiday camps for disabled people of all ages in Chabrouh, Lebanon

The Lebanese Association of the Order of Malta (LAKM) is the primary health provider via 4 mobile clinics for more than 200,000 individuals, including up to 40,000 in Akkar. The large majority of users (95%) are Syrian refugees, a disadvantaged and vulnerable group with highly complex medical and psychological needs - but have limited medical documentation. This makes it challenging for camp volunteers to provide the best possible care. The service faces several operational challenges:

• Patients with complex medical needs.
• Limited resources and limited links to specialist care.
• Reliance on paper records.
• Difficult to monitor clinical activity, expenses, and produce reports

Paper Records | Challenges

Logistics:

• Organising records for transport takes 1 hour each day.
• It takes 3 hours to transcribe clinic activity into a separate database for reporting and analysis.
• Management must prepare reports manually.
• Finding and creating records for patients onsite is a time consuming, manual process.

Limited Data:

• Paper records capture limited clinical information.

Paper records are only able to capture very limited clinical information. Getting a patient’s complete medical story from their notes is difficult, and records do not have a ‘summary’ page. These factors slow the clinics down and impact the quality of care they are able to provide. Low-resolution data also affects the Order of Malta’s ability to track clinic activity, costs, and demands on the service. When data are transcribed, the information is grouped into broad categories only.