Indian health tech platform turns to Ethereum to incentivise patients to share clinical data with researchers

Health tech platform OncoCoin has announced that it will soon launch Amrit – an Ethereum based utility crypto token.  The latter is an effort to incentivise patients to share their own data with research organisations, as medical AI research realises the need for real-world patient data.  

OncoCoin is an existing network that reaches out to cancer patients, and claims to give them the option of sharing their own health and treatment data with organisations – at their own discretion. 

Clarifying the model of operation, Dr Gunjan Bharadwaj, founder and CEO of OncoCoin’s holding company Innoplexus AG, said, “Amrit will act as the chosen medium of exchange for transactions, which represent the value of patient data and services that are available inside the ecosystem.  

Patients will receive tokens in return for the data they contribute and license for research purposes, which they can then use to purchase services in the ecosystem – such as availing an independent second opinion.” 

Bharadwaj says that the initiative aims to build a community of international patients, which can help generate a diverse pool of medical data that research organisations can then license.  

He also claims that Amrit will help preserve the privacy of users sharing their data.  

The utility token will be based on the Openzeppelin ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, which Bharadwaj claims can also help anonymise patient data, should that be requested. 

The company claims that the ecosystem that it envisions will help generate a wide pool of real-world data that can “speed up” medical research. While OncoCoin purely specialises in oncology, or the study of cancer, through a patient network app named Curia, the company says that they plan to expand the Amrit token into neurology as well, in order to collect patient data involving critical illnesses such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases.