When Raj Sharma’s mother was hospitalized after a fall a few years ago, she was tested and discharged that same day, but the pain persisted. At another hospital the next day, medical staff performed the same tests that she had done 18 hours ago.
“The pain and the sheer waste of money was appalling,” Sharma said.
Having founded two Maryland telecom companies, NexTone Communications and 3CLogic, the tech entrepreneur knew there were ways to improve how we collect and share health data.
In 2017 he founded software platform Health Wizz to tackle the problem, and today he’s launching a full version of the app along with a pilot program at Cape Fear Valley Hospital in North Carolina.
The free app has two main functions: first, to aggregate and organize a user’s medical data from hospitals, clinics and wearables; and second (the feature launched today), to convert that data into a digital asset that can be shared privately and securely for rewards points.
“Consumers are becoming more aware that they need to take control of their data,” Sharma said. “They see companies like Facebook and Google selling their data and they’re not getting anything out of it.”
Health Wizz connects patients to medical systems hungry for personal data in a decentralized marketplace based on the Ethereum blockchain.
For example, Cape Fear Valley Hospital is penalized for re-admitting a patient within 30 days of discharging them. So, it can ask a recently discharged patient to enter some data daily on Health Wizz in exchange for some HealthCoins. The physicians can track the patient’s recovery, and the patient can exchange HealthCoins for rewards like Amazon gift cards.
A research organization can do the same – trading the rewards points for data from specific app users. Sharma said Health Wizz will launch campaigns with clinical trials and researchers, inviting users to join and charging the organization for pairing them.
“Hospital systems will be the first to come on board,” he said. “Once there are more users, then trials, researchers and pharmaceutical companies become interested.”
Sharma said the platform is built on the Ethereum blockchain to cut out middlemen, in this case data brokers, and to create a tamper-proof ledger to ensure users’ medical data are accurate. Medical records do not appear on the public blockchain ledger – just a record of the transaction occurring.
The data is encrypted on both ends, Sharma said, and personal medical data is stored on the user’s phone instead of a database, making it significantly less likely to be hacked.
“We have tried to make the blockchain part invisible, making user wallets as user-friendly as we can and still very secure.”
Health Wizz is headquartered in Falls Church and has 12 employees. Sharma said funding to build the platform came from himself and co-founders Nitin Desai and Sirish Bajpai, as well as angel investors.
