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"We are entering a very exciting time in Hyperledger's evolution, as more and more of these technologies are being deployed in various production settings," Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf said in a statement. "The size and scale of our membership and our technologies has fueled rapid innovation and, now, increasing application across industries and geographies.”
“Our newest members will play a key role in feeding that growth, helping bring blockchain and distributed ledger technologies to the core of business, government and consumer transactions."
Ehave and CareiQ join other healthcare organizations in the Hyperledger project including Change Healthcare.
Late last year, Change Healthcare released the first healthcare blockchain solution using The Hyperledger framework Fabric 1.0. Its solution will help payers and providers increase their revenue cycle efficiency.
"We are very excited to join the The Linux Foundation and Hyperledger community to continue our collaborative efforts in leveraging the blockchain technology within the healthcare industry," CareiQ CIO Dustin Minter said in a statement. “Our Hyperledger membership converges blockchain with emerging technologies in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) provides new opportunities to explore digital health economies. In result, we are cutting time and costs, while connecting the dots among millions of 'things' enabling innovation for better, clearer personalized diagnoses allowing for a greater focus on preventative rather than reactive care."
Adding blockchain to other innovative developments and projects is a way health IT companies can enhance their tools and better integrate them into healthcare organizations using the Hyperledger standard.
Hyperledger’s goal is to help organizations build industry-specific applications, platforms, and hardware using blockchain for better overall interoperability.
"We are excited to join Hyperledger to help shape and advance an open standard for protecting health data for patients, clinicians, researchers and other healthcare stakeholders," said Ehave, Inc. CEO Prateek Dwivedi. "As a provider of a cloud based health informatics platform, data security and patient privacy are the cornerstones of our architecture, and we look forward to working with leading organizations to ensure patients feel confident that their data is safe."
Blockchain was almost non-existent in healthcare until the last few months. After Change Healthcare released its blockchain solution, several other organizations followed suit.
Earlier this week Alternate Health announced its EHR solutions powered by blockchain, and Luxoft along with Appian built a blockchain adapter for organizations using Appian’s rapid app development platform aimed at the healthcare industry.
Open source communities become more important to the development process as blockchain technology continues to develop. Open source communities and workgroups are an invaluable tool for new and innovative technology because it helps the technology develop faster.
Sharing ideas, trials, and errors with a blockchain workgroup can prevent organizations from repeating common mistakes during development. This approach can also help other organizations discover complex and advanced uses of blockchain without each entity needing to come across these discoveries on their own. Organizations can use parts of code that has already been developed instead of developing their own.
Hyperledger is currently the biggest open source blockchain project and its members are working toward developing a standard so blockchain can he be included as a vital and standard part of IT infrastructure. By adding more healthcare members, the faster the technology will become standard in the healthcare industry.