The HBAR Foundation Expands Privacy Preservation Focus Into Healthcare Tech

Expansion into new vertical is about more than market fit, it can also save lives‍

Together with the HBAR Foundation, I’m proud to announce an expansion of focus that now includes support for developers building healthcare technologies in the Hedera Ecosystem.

But our motivations are a bit more profound than just an overlapping product-market fit.

Because while there’s a lot to admire about Hedera’s technology and its pioneering governance, I believe its mission of supporting human-centric solutions is why so many of the brightest minds are behind it.

Ultimately, everything we do is based on the belief that the Hedera ecosystem has the best talent, tech, and vision to build people-first Web3 products that solve real-world problems.

And while Web3 is abundant with aspirational promises of industry-changing tech that will change people's lives someday, what distinguishes our expansion into healthcare is that it brings life-saving solutions to the market now.

As someone who’s both worked at the CDC and been an early adopter of Hedera technology, I’ve long held the view that this tech is poised to play a critical role in supporting privacy and healthcare related use cases, including many scenarios—such as for regulatory compliance—where there’s an overlap between the two.

And the projects we’re now able to support with the expansion into the Healthcare space not only solve privacy problems…they can save lives.

Literally. 

Put simply, we’ll find success in Healthcare by building on the strength of privacy projects we’ve supported, like:

• Tuum Metamask Identity Snap
  Identity Snap on Metamask for developers builds out Digital Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) on the Hedera network.
  

• iOwnMe Individual’s Right Protection (by iPrivata)
  IOWNME enables end-users of a network to have legal title to all data and make individual determinations about privacy. This provides direct control to the individual backed by well-established IP-based legal protections worldwide.
  

• HealthReady Cancer Patient Engagement
  HealthReady enables the verification of patient consent to access healthcare data, and patient-reported outcome verification and authenticity.
  

• MyTERA Task Exposure and Occupational Health Assessment
  Platform for managing occupational health hazards, helps streamline the challenges of regulatory complexity and eliminates data fragmentation, whilst cutting the completion time of occupational health risk assessments from 40 hours to 4 minutes.
  

• Health Data Explorer+ Public Health Reporting (with State of Alabama)
  Combines intuitive reporting, robust analytics, and real-time data visualization to offer a comprehensive solution for harnessing the power of health data.
  

The importance of an individual’s privacy online is relatively easy to understand. A world where people own and control their personal data means more autonomy, security, and equitable opportunities for anyone to benefit from the data economy, if they want to. 

All good things.

Our previous successes in the overarching privacy space demonstrate the viability of Hedera-built solutions in highly regulated industries with rigid compliance standards and the issues we’re aiming to solve in healthcare are just as important, albeit often a bit more technical to explain.

Some of the key objectives we are planning to meet through Hedera-enabled innovations supported by the HBAR Foundation include:

1. Leverage existing validated and HIPAA/GDPR-compliant systems. With an informed integration and proper interoperability measures, healthcare systems do not necessarily need to be on-chain nor revalidated to get the value-added benefits of cryptography-enabled solutions.
   
2. Lower data centralization costs. Leveraging existing decentralized health data sources–innovations in DLT-enabled federated search and analytics lower the need for costly migration of health data to the cloud or development intelligence layers on proprietary vendor platforms.
   
3. Scale on demand. Integrate Hedera with modern DevOps to allow underlying solutions to meet volume, processing speed and a range of functional and cryptographics services on demand. 
   
4. Provide cryptographic authenticity. Leverage Hedera to provide proactive cryptographic evidence of data origination, data owner’s rights, consent to share and provenance of data, particularly when developing derivative content through GenAI.

We’ll dive deeper into all of these use cases as we continue to showcase new grantees throughout the remainder of the year and beyond.In the meantime, we leave you with this: privacy and healthcare are two broad areas where DLT solutions can have an actual, long-lasting impact on people’s daily lives and society at large. We’re excited to continue cultivating this ecosystem by driving development of practical industry solutions and open-source contributions to the overall Hedera builder community.