The Medicalchain ICO is set to launch on February 1st, with no projected end date in sight. The project is essentially a blockchain made specifically for health records. Despite the world being in an entire data revolution, medical data has yet to catch up with other industries. The current systems the industry uses are centralized, slow, and often extremely vulnerable. It can also take days for doctors’ offices to share records with one another.

BMJ, a U.K based publisher of medical journals and clinical research, published a podcast back on May 3rd, 2016 that states that in the U.S 250,000 patients die a year due to medical error. However, the U.S Center for Disease Control and Prevention does not classify medical errors on their list for death. If they were to add medical errors into the figures, it would be the 3rd largest killer annually in the United States. Martin Makary, a professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, believes that the CDC controls where most of the funding for research is going.

Currently, most funding is being allocated to the top two causes of death: heart disease and cancer. Since medical errors don’t appear, it doesn’t receive the attention it deserves.

Makary says:

“Unwarranted variation is endemic in health care. Developing consensus protocols that streamline the delivery of medicine and reduce variability can improve quality and lower costs in healthcare. More research on preventing medical errors from occurring is needed to address the problem.”