Longenesis, a Riga, Latvia-based but Hong Kong-incorporated company, is bringing medical records to the blockchain in South Korea using Bitfury's Exonum platform.
, which was formed in late 2017, provides a suite of modular blockchain solutions for medical providers, supplying everything from user interfaces for patient interaction to medical recordkeeping. But its main focus has become medical-consent technologies.
With its platform, every step of the process is linked, verifiable and auditable. The patient agrees to specified care or participation in a study or a trial. They can withdraw that agreement, while the medical provider can offer to extend, modify or amend the agreement.
According to the company, it will be providing its medical-consent platform-as-a-service to Hanshin Medipia Medical Center and Infinity Care. That brings to four the number of business relationships it has in South Korea, currently the company’s primary market of focus.t
The key, said Denis Bazinov, Longenesis project manager, is the way in which the system works with pharmaceutical companies and research institutions. They can peruse the anonymous metadata to see what information might be available. They can then offer to the owner of the data—the patient—the opportunity to participate trials or studies or release their existing information to be used in the evaluation of a medicine or procedure.
Bazinov said this is very different from current normal operating procedures. In most cases, consent is handled by using paper forms, and the system for renewing, updating and altering consent is haphazard and inconsistent. Once the data is collected, it is traded in an OTC-like manner, with researchers paying for bulk deliveries of information that may not be reliable or properly collected.
“What our platform offers is a transparent chain from the patient through to the hospital,” Bazinov said. “Our desire is to make more information available to the researchers, who now face problems of quantity and quality.”
Hanshin Medipia, located in Seocho, Seoul, specializes in testing and health checkups. Infinity Care is the developer of a healthcare algorithm.
Longenesis is already active in South Korea and has two previous transactions in the market. In April, it signed an agreement with Incheon-based Gil Medical Center to develop a blockchain solution for medical-data management. The other relationship is with Korea’s Terragene.
The solution being provided by Longenesis utilizes Bitfury's Exonum, a framework for decentralized blockchain applications. According to Bitfury, the platform is highly secure, transparent and auditable, written using the Rust programing language.
Longenesis has the exclusive license for the use of Exonum in the medical field.
The company notes that the product is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant, so it meets both US and EU standards.
was founded in 2014 and has raised a total of $14.3 million, according to Crunchbase. Bitfury, a blockchain company, has raised a total of $170 million over a number of funding rounds. Investors include Macquarie Capital. At the end of 2018, valuation was estimated at more than $1 billion.
Bitfury, which is considering an initial public offering this year, already has significant relationships with South Korean partners. Earlier this year, it established Bitcoin mining operations in Paraguay with Commons Foundation, a Seoul-based group. Korelya Capital, which is based in Paris and connected with South Korea's Naver, was an investor in an $80 million Bitfury funding round late last year.
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