The Western Lifestyle
Preventable conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, kill more than 40 million people each year. These and other diseases reflect the "Western lifestyle," which has unfortunately permeated the world. People eat too much in general and too many fatty foods in particular. They spend an inordinate amount of time sitting and don't get nearly enough activity.

This is no surprise. Individuals understand they are the authors of their own misery – consider the thriving diet industry – they just lack the incentives to make changes. Simple adjustments, such as eating lean proteins and fewer processed foods, going on short walks or even taking a few deep breaths, are beyond their abilities.
To be fair, people are faced with constant encouragements to consume from both advertising and peer groups. To overcome this, we need to develop a powerful way to counterbalance these adverse messages.

So far, this has been a tough nut to crack. Physician admonishments to "adopt more healthy behaviors" are episodic and can't possibly compete with the consumption chorus. In addition, "being healthy" is an abstract incentive. A patient who has adopted an unhealthy lifestyle for years, or even decades, may not have the slightest inkling what that would look or feel like. In other words, we need to develop more tangible incentives to encourage healthier living.

Combining portability and wellness
Both of these issues can be remedied with one solution: blockchain. This technology has been popularized through crypto currencies, but its applications are much broader. By leveraging blockchain, we can give each patient control over their own self-sovereign medical records, which they can share at their discretion. In addition, blockchain can easily enable incentive programs to better support patients as they adopt healthier lifestyles.

Blockchain can do all this because it's decentralized, secure and auditable. Decentralization is key. Patient data are distributed through thousands of computer nodes, and these records are constantly audited against each other. This distributed model makes blockchain virtually impossible to hack.

Through encryption keys, patients have the ability to provide their records to anyone who needs them. This could be a specialist, an emergency department physician or an insurance or pharmaceutical company. Because the platform is EMR-agnostic, it could align multiple systems, removing this significant barrier. Blockchain would not eliminate existing EMR systems. Rather, it would harvest their data, boosting efficiency, lowering costs and improving outcomes.

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