# First Team Meeting Worksheet

## Team Members Present

* Gabe Kotsonis
* Kevin Cai
* Elorm Coch
* Tanvir Islam
* Chibuzo Chiwike
* Scott Crawshaw

## I. Identify a Common Vision
*You’ve all voted on a common idea and themes. Now is the time to work through your commonalities and find a unifying vision between all of you. Answer the following for each of you. This is the time to speak your mind. Be honest with each other.*
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### Commonalities
*We are all interested in leveraging our different interests and skills to creatively complete a large-scale project of our design. Our diverse skillsets should allow us to come together and tackle the different, necessary parts of our larger project.*

### Inspiration
*Creating products that identify inefficiencies in the current state of the world and rectifying them while also having a little fun with it.*

### Problems of Interest
*Difficulty of accessing pertinent medical records between hospitals for patients in time-sensitive situations. Improving the security of how sensitive information is stored within hospitals to protect against adversaries.*

### Identify
*The problems we identified all can be addressed with one product through decentralizing the manner in which sensitive data is stored and retrieved through private keys (Digital Signature Algorithms).*

## II. Narrow In
*Now let's try narrowing in on a problem that interests all of you. Make sure to go around the table and listen to everybody on your team without interruption.*

### Problem Statement
*There are large inefficiencies in the transfer of medical records between hospitals around the US due to the absence of a unified Medical Records database. This creates unnecessary administrative costs in the healthcare system.*

### Rephrase
*How might we uniformally streamline the process of uploading and retrieving medical data between care providers?*

### Reframe
*Reframe the question in at least 5 different ways to change the question fundamentally or imply a different solution set. Try changing scope, or audience, or technology.*

1. How can we ensure that in medical emergencies, hospitals are able to quickly and securely access patients' medical history?
2. How can we create an immutable system for healthcare records that can allow hospitals to access patient medical records globally?
3. How might we provide patients with more visibility and control of how their medical records are stored and shared with healthcare providers?
4. How might we leverage block-chain technologies to better access and write patient data efficiently?
5. Is there a secure way to allow for more active data-sharing and collaboration between different healthcare providers?

### Choose
*Our fourth reframe: "how might we leverage block-chain technologies to better access and write patient data efficiently?"*

#### Coolness
*What could be cool about this potential project?*
It would be cool to learn and utilize block-chain technologies to better simplify the medical world, and offer hospitals a streamlined way to access and create patient information and share said info with other hospitals across the country and maybe world.

#### Challenges
*Navigating the legality of our project, attempting to fundamentally change such a large-scale system. Also, the project itself isn't necessarily "fun"; it attempts to find a solution for a serious real-world problem.*

#### Success
*We would consider our project successful if, by the end of these six months, we have deployed our product to a live blockchain and tested it with multiple organizations (and received positive feedback).*

## III. Survey the State of the Art
*Do some research — this will be fleshed out further in a full milestone but do some now quickly all together to get started. Try to find what else is out there that is similar, either products, or technical papers that are related.*

* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7010942/
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1460458219866350
* [A. Shahnaz, U. Qamar and A. Khalid, "Using Blockchain for Electronic Health Records," in IEEE Access, vol. 7, pp. 147782-147795, 2019, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2946373.](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8863359)
* [Blockchain For Health Data and Its Potential Use in
Health IT and Health Care Related Research](https://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/11-74-ablockchainforhealthcare.pdf)
* [Corportations and China use Blockchain technologies for supply chain management](https://www.prnewswire.com/in/news-releases/far-more-than-walmart-china-how-vechain-leads-blockchain-adoption-in-the-food-industry-around-the-globe-825926512.html)

### Similar Goals
*Yes, there are other companies/groups who have attempted similar projects, but none have taken off, as it's still a very new area/field.*

### Differences
*We mainly want to store textual data and reports, as opposed to images and other files (which makes HIPAA compliance easier). This also reduces the cost of adding to the blockchain, making it more accessible. If the data got large enough, we would also incorporate a external data storage system to aid in cost.*

### Inspiration
*Are there any existing products/techniques/research, that we could, by analogy, draw inspiration from?*
* [MedicalChain](https://medicalchain.com/Medicalchain-Whitepaper-EN.pdf)
* [Vechain](https://www.vechain.org/)
* [Bitcoin](https://bitcoin.org/en/)
* [PROOF.WORK](https://proof.work/)