Medicalchain uses blockchain technology to securely store health records and maintain a single version of the truth. The different organizations such as doctors, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacists and health insurers can request permission to access a patient’s record to serve their purpose and record transactions on the distributed ledger. Medicalchain provides solutions to today’s health record problems. The platform is built to securely store and share electronic health records. By digitizing health records and empowering users we can leverage countless industry synergies. Medicalchain is building a platform for secure storage and utilization of electronic health records on the blockchain. The company is also building a telemedicine platform to allow users to directly connect with healthcare professionals, share their records and get consultations, second opinions, online through a secure channel.The company was originally founded in February 2016 to provide a software solution inside hospitals. The solution is known as ‘Discharge Summary’ and it uses a workflow tool to accurately write an assessment of a patient as they are being discharged from surgery or a long hospital visit. The software is currently being used by hospitals in UK and the team decided to extend this project and go further with Medicalchain. Medicalchain wants people to have access to their health records everywhere. Today, you can travel far and wide and you will have access to your phone, contacts, photos, files, bank accounts but not your health records - probably the most important and life saving information you need. In most developed countries around the world you, as a patient, have a legal right to request your records. Medicalchain is providing you with a platform to do that. But more importantly, Medicalchain wants its users to be able to use it immediately by communicating and sharing (on a time limited basis) with other doctors. The bigger vision is to allow pharmaceutical, insurance and other healthcare organisations and stakeholders to be able to interact with health records on patients' terms. Medicalchain believes that health records should be a part of everyone’s life and not just referred to when someone is ill.
Counterparty is a platform for user-created assets on Bitcoin. It’s a protocol, set of specifications, and an API. Taken together, it allows users to create and trade assets on top of Bitcoin’s blockchain. In this way, Counterparty is similar to platforms like Waves or Ethereum. Of course, the difference is Counterparty integrates directly with Bitcoin. Therefore, it comes will all the security and reliability (and issues) that are part of the Bitcoin blockchain. This is a fairly old project. In fact, it pre-dates Ethereum with its launch in 2014. It was the original asset creation mechanism. As you’re probably aware, Counterparty has faded from prominence over the years. This is largely due to the rise of the ERC-20 token standard on Ethereum. While we’ve become used to calling blockchain assets, tokens, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. An asset can represent anything that has value or is rare. As a result, Counterparty steers clear of the word “token” in their marketing and documentation. They’re much more interested in digital assets of all kinds, not just currencies, securities, and utility tokens. Digital assets can be a digital marker of a physical object, an easy way to manage shares in your company, or reputation karma for a website. These are all types of assets you could create on Counterparty (or Ethereum or Waves, for that matter). Counterparty creates the set of rules, requirements, integrations, etc that are necessary for assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. It’s the infrastructure behind user-created assets in much the same way that the ERC-20 protocol sets up guidelines and standards for asset creation on Ethereum. One useful function of digital assets is as a marker of ownership or voting rights. Imagine a scenario where you issued a digital asset to each of your company’s board members in proportion to the amount of voting power held. Or if you gave your stockholders a digital asset as a marker of the amount of stock they owned. If you issued your stock asset, you could then use Counterparty’s distribution function to pay out dividends in BTC based on the amount of digital stock asset each person owned. Counterparty addresses many of the same issues as Ethereum or Waves, but on the Bitcoin blockchain. While that does come with some advantages, ultimately it is not as strong a platform for development as its competitors. It’s best suited for applications that need to interface with Bitcoin or assets that have a specific connection to the Bitcoin ecosystem.