I had to the opportunity to contribute to CareChain NZ: Blockchain in Healthcare Symposium in Auckland recently that was brilliantly organised by Tom Varghese and Tech Futures Lab.
Mark from Blockchain Labs NZ kicked the evening off with a Blockchain 101 talking about what is distributed ledger technology, how does it work, and how can blockchain help healthcare. Mark had a great example of explaining trust and decentralisation using neighbourhood trading using trusty “Harold” (love the name!) who Alice and Bob have known for a long time as an example. Blockchain enables Harold to be removed from the equation.
Next was Shahid Saiyad from IBM talking about what applications blockchains have the most promise in healthcare. IBM have put significant efforts in the blockchain space.
The funniest talk of the evening had to go to Jerome Faury from Centrality. He kinda set the scene from the beginning with his t-shirt!
Katherine Noall from Sphere Identity shared fascinating blockchain insights for identity management in healthcare.
Kris Vette from Chain Ecosystem discussed the options to enable blockchain adoption and success in healthcare and what factors influence the scalability of blockchain projects.
Alex Sims talked regulation and privacy (a topic she could talk about forever because she is an expert!) and specifically about the myths and truths about privacy and the role of regulation in the success of blockchain uptake in healthcare.
The evening finished with Gina Couper from Mind Screen, a business empowering people to manage their mental wellness and Dr Mohsin Chaudhry from HealthDex, an enterprise health data blockchain platform and decentralized exchange.
I ended up talking about if blockchains can help reduce healthcare cost, is incentivising healthcare possible and provided some health token examples.
All in all it was a great event, very information and hopefully all the attendees were able to take something away from the evening. The food was amazing but in my mad rush to the airport, I left my gift behind! Oh well.
