Rising medical costs are a bane to the population especially as countries grow to become an “aging” population. The same can be said of Malaysia, which can be expected to be an “aging” population by 2030!! Without dropping medical costs, the costs of Social Security are bound to stretch any Government’s Budget, especially Malaysia where the Healthcare budget for 2017 is RM27 billion (US$6.75 billion).
Malaysia has one the world’s cheapest healthcare systems with Consultancy costs to visit a General Practioner at RM1 (US$0.20) and a Specialist at RM5 (US$1.25). Such low costs dents the national budget which is in deficit and the country is bearing more and more debt.
Here is me in front of a Public Hospital in ….
A two tiered Healthcare system (Public and Private) also provides a dichotomy between PREMIER expensive services and the NORMAL ones for the rest of population. Make no mistake, Malaysia’s private healthcare facilities have been ranked #4 in the world for Retirees from other countries. No surprise here, as the key benefit for getting good healthcare in Malaysia is that the doctors speak English and that we have some of the best-trained doctors in Asia, with many graduating from the United States, United Kingdom and Australia.
Now here is me in front of a Private Hospital in ….
Peer Atlas helps our Malaysian national healthcare by providing a WORLD CLASS, PEER REVIEW, AD FREE, medical library at no charge to the User. High subscriptions fees will be thing of the past and the Medical Community can react faster to incidence of breakout of disease. For example, for many year since the 1970s, Malaysia was thought of to have contained tuberculosis. However, the influx of foreign workers (supplying the much needed labour in a growing economy) has led to disease affecting Malaysians again. However, there is scant knowledge on how to effectively treat and contain this communicable disease, since the expertise is not there.
This is where Peer Atlas plays the perfect role by giving our Medical community ACCESS to data about Tuberculosis, which now reside behind huge PAY WALLS. Only them can evidenced based medicine procedures be applied to the treatment of this disease.
Peer Atlas revolutionary concept is to establish an Encyclopedia, a Wikipedia, of medical information and make it accessible and FREE, in short, democratizing VALUABLE (or rather INVALUABLE) medical information!! The Atlas tokens serve as the payment mechanism to incentivize contributions (articles, medical data, medical algorithms which are high level flowcharts developed through extensive medical research etc.) from the medical professionals. The Atlas tokens can also be redeemed for Contributing Medical Education (CME) credits.
This project had its humble beginnings in 2011 when Brad Mattson, M.D., sought to make the majority of high quality medical information for free. In the spirit of the Internet and Wikipedia, why should such critical life saving information be available on websites which charge high subscription fees? Since Doctors will create the information for Peer Atlas, it will be held to very high standards. The tolerance for error is ZERO. Hence, Peer Atlas is one of the earliest organisations involved in what is essentially ETHICAL CROWDFUNDING.
The Medical community is extremely regulated, and since it involves human lives, it should be tightly regulated too. But isn’t blockchain the anti thesis of all of this, especially on the issue of anonymity? Why would we want an anonymous figure to provide Medical Advice anyways?
Enter NEO, the public blockchain from China, or often dubbed as the Ethereum of China. NEO combines Digital Assets, Digital Identities, and Smart Contracts which can be used by Governments (through NEO) and Enterprises (through Onchain). Digital Identity, Cross Chain interoperability and Filesharing are all part of NEO’s roadmap. In fact, NEO started out due to the problems of solving Digital Identity in China. Identity verification of the contributors to the Medical Encyclopedia is done through Public Key infrastructure (PKI) X.509 standards. Deploying Peer Atlas on NEO also assures of super fast transactions and the ability to code in many popular languages, dramatically reducing development time.
Deploying Peer Atlas is bound to be a two pronged effect on the Healthcare System:
- The Government service can drastically reduce their costs while improving service levels (e.g focusing on other issues such as building new facilities to reduce congestion and long waits)
- The Private Sector will be able to reduce costs due to the elimination of EXPENSIVE Paywalls, allowing expertise healthcare to be provided to the Citizens at a lower cost (it will still be higher than the Public Hospitals, of course)
Note that there are already Private “Wings” in Government hospitals which are providing higher service levels (similar to those in the Private Hospitals) at a reduced cost – reducing costs here would benefit both the provider community (through compensation with the Peer Atlas token) as well as customers (bring first class medical services to the masses).
On a final note. many would probably ask on the “Potential Return” of Peer Atlas. So lets compare this with a similar offering from Medibloc, a Korean ICO who launched an ICO in the 4th Quarter of 2017. It went up 40X in terms of FIAT VALUE, a
This from an investment perspective, the should set up Peer Altas very well, despite the unbelievers! Low Cost Medical services is everyone’s right, and Peer Atlas is an important cog in the engine to deliver this mission!