ICO Review: Well

Well is a global blockchain protocol aiming to eliminate country borders and connect healthcare specialists and patients.

As a pretty hot-button topic in blockchain technologies, Well is looking to go after the massive healthcare and insurance industry, hoping to solve problems such as access for cross-border payments, data accessibility, and payment risk.

With a hard cap of $28 million and a total raised so far of $14.6 million, Well is on it’s way to getting the funding they need to begin their global healthcare blockchain protocol. Here’s what we think of their whitepaper:

Well’s Mission

Well aims to target those that are underserved via a single point of access for both minor and serious conditions that transcend country borders, provides data, best practices, and innovation in compliant and secure ways.

Problems They Aim To Solve

Limited Access To Healthcare

Well believes that a vast majority of the healthcare market is only available to developed nations with highly advanced and established infrastructures. With a growing patient-to-physician gap, limited access to medical services, and rising healthcare costs, the need for new tech in inevitable.

Furthermore, Well believes that in combination with items like IoT technologies and other emerging healthcare tools, the implementation on the blockchain will only help connect patients and physicians everywhere.

Rise of Home Healthcare Increasing

Another pain point Well identifies is that with more people getting treatment at home, being able to drive that cost down with blockchain as an underrepresented aspect of the industry.

Medical Data Marketplace and Distributed Network

WELL, looks to enable an open, distributed and secure data marketplace for patients to retain access control of their data, as well as can monetize access to their data by healthcare providers and researchers. Furthermore, healthcare providers, research organizations, and other institutions have the opportunity to substantially reduce costs and barriers associated with traditional data access, aggregation, and sharing methods, creating an open medical data marketplace and infrastructure to build a telehealth network.

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Additional problems Well views their protocol solves includes:

Insurance Verification/Payment Detail

This includes managing escrow accounts through smart contracts, releasing payment upon completion and approval of milestones such as visits, paperwork, completion, invoicing, etc

Record Keeping/Security

As with a lot of sensitive data, the blockchain enables a decentralized network, so there’s no central database at risk of a hack.

Fraud

Blockchain enables timestamping, transparency, and indisputable has records of all steps of a patients care, ensuring fraud elimination.

Reputation

Well is aiming to integrate with Civic to store digital identities on the blockchain and enable an infrastructure for compliance and performance tracking.

The Protocol

The actual Well protocol will create the distributed, secure medical data storage and marketplace for the healthcare industry. They aim to use what’s called a Proof of Authority blockchain network, where patients will have verifiable and direct control over their personal health data. Patients will also be able to monetize directly off their data through the Well token incentive structure and application.

Proof Of Authority Blockchain

The Proof Of Authority Blockchain affords efficiency and high-throughput capacity by executing computational secure Trusted Execution Environment (TEE).

Modeled after the Proof Of Stake blockchain for its known validators and a governance-based penalty system, the POA node validators are incentivized through reputation, and the system is predicated on trust that all nodes are running the same software and validating blocks.

The Platform

Well’s platform lists the ability to benefit three actors:

Providers

1. Faster transaction settlement.
2. Accurate and verifiable pre-authorization of payment.
3. Blockchain immutability and hash-based data security.
4. Near frictionless access to cross-border payments.
5. Intuitive platform interface is available across a range of devices.
6. Ability to earn WELL tokens for providing access to under-utilized computing and storage resources.

Payer

1. Verifiable proof of member identity: Assurance of proper treatment and reduced fraud.
2. Faster transaction settlement and lower costs: Removal of financial intermediaries.
3. Blockchain immutability: Ease of audits through transparency and efficient fraud detection.
4. Shared distributed ledger: Elimination of “double recordkeeping.”

Member/Patient

1. Control of and monetization of personal data.
2. Verifiable data integrity and security.
3. Privacy
4. Accurate and verifiable pre-authorization.
5. Ability to earn WELL tokens for providing access to un/under-utilized computing and storage resources.

Our Thoughts

Well goes much deeper into their whitepaper on their blockchain solution, which for the most part, seems like a viable project. However, as Well is going after healthcare, this is still a go-big or go-home type project. Although they do a great job of outlining their initial solution, who it helps, and how it works together, one piece of note is that they lack any discussion on how they plan to integrate with current healthcare infrastructure. After all, if you’re going to be disrupting an industry that nearly all of use, showcasing a go-to-market strategy is crucial.

Despite our criticisms, this is an ICO people have bought significantly into, most likely for the reasoning listed above on its potential of being a monumental shift. The application of it, however, is going to take quite a bit of time. As it goes with a lot these “game changer” ICOs, your support should be because you believe they’ll be the front runners in health blockchain, and as such, you’re willing to hold on until the project takes off.