With the support of the Innovation Fund, a Mexican startup develops its blockchain. The United Nations Organization is interested in open source projects.
Since 2015, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has been exploring ways to leverage blockchains to support its global humanitarian efforts and accelerate results for children.
For that reason, the organization’s Innovation Fund provided financing to six companies operating in the sector, three of which are in Latin America. Among the companies in the region is Prescrypto, which developed an electronic prescription service in Mexico.
The objective of the United Nations Fund is to invest in all types of open source technologies, to put them to the benefit of children, according to Christopher Fabian, co-director of the UNICEF innovation section, who highlighted the reasons why the international organization is interested in blockchain.
Fabian noted that UNICEF is in the phase of discovering how blockchain technologies can be used to create a better world. “That is exactly the stage when its Innovation Fund invests: when our financing, technical support, and focus on vulnerable populations can help a technology grow and mature in the most fair and equitable way possible,” he said.
To give deeper details on how the Latin American startup Prescrypto is working with UNICEF, Everardo Barojas, co-founder and director of the company, explains the main reason why the blockchain project that he represents won the support of the organization.
In fact, Barojas believes that situations can become more complex when it is understood that the lack of correspondence between doctors, pharmacies, and patients can endanger many lives. This led to the question of how to maintain good communication between all the actors in the blockchain, when most medicine outlets are stores for family subsistence or independent stores. Actually, of the existing 40,000 places of sale of medicines, only 13,000 belong to pharmacy chains.
It is required that the pharmacy staff is fully trained to verify that a medical prescription is signed, the data of both doctor and the patient are complete and the professional certificate coincides with that of the specialist who issued the prescription. This task becomes more complex if the staff is not trained, since the number of medical prescriptions is increasing.
In this regard, the CEO of Prescrypto states that the project arose from the need to develop an application that would allow patients, providers and payers to have a blockchain-based infrastructure to collect prescription information, send it safely to pharmacies and provide a history of the medicines used by each patient.
To this end, he developed his blockchain, called Rexchain, which is open source and therefore free, with a model similar to that used for Bitcoin. The difference is that the encryption technology is RSA (Rivest, Shamir and Adleman), which has an elliptic curve system instead of a cryptography system.
Among the technical specifications that Barojas considers relevant about the RexChain blockchain, he highlights that its infrastructure is based on the electronic signature laws of Latin America, where they intend to expand. Therefore, they are preparing to make themselves known in Chile, to follow with Colombia and Argentina.
The startup is based on a system that includes ensuring the integrity of the data in the medical records, documenting the patient’s consent to share the data and publishing the information in the provider directory, so that it is possible to identify the doctors and hospitals with credentials.
Another contribution achieved by a blockchain-based application is to guarantee the integrity of the data, as well as that of the doctor whist ensuring that the prescription is used only once to buy medicines. It also contributes to such a transparent level of traceability of medicines that can increase operational efficiency and help decrease the rates of drug theft. It is worth noting that these elements are consistent with UNICEF’s efforts.
By Willmen Blanco
