Secure patient charting: A first step towards precision medicine

• Pearl Data Firm
• Sat, 30 Oct

How Pearl Data Firm has approached tracking and sharing of medical data by putting patients in the driving seat.

How precise are we talking?

Precision medicine is a medical model that proposes the customization of healthcare, with medical decisions, treatments, practices, or products being tailored to a subgroup of patients, instead of a one‐drug‐fits‐all model.

Picture a future where we don’t just have a drug for the flu, but have a procedure which constructs a drug after an analysis of the patient.

We are not there yet, but recently, with drug discovery comprising of running computational models which construct molecules using chemical properties of pathogens as input, many possible remedies can be found to a single ailment, and often with more data about the environment, such as patient’s blood characteristics different drugs can be designed for subgroups of the population.

Then just do it already…

Expect we can’t, although this extra data about a patient may be available during drug discovery, on prescription, the doctor may need to take expensive tests to determine which sub-groups a patient is in to prescribe the respective drug, even when the patient has had this information tested or measured before, there is simply no way to get and use this data in prescription.

You said something about a first step

To fix the problem of unavailable data, we decided to build a patient charting solution, Mage(https://mage.health/) where patients record their medical data on all visits and can securely share it with a doctor who needs their history.

Security is a prime concern considering the sensitivity of the data, we are putting the patient in control. The data is stored under the only theorectically-uncrackable encryption technique: the One-time pad. With full offline sharing functionality, and a cool new dynamic QR code sharing technique, the patient may disable any online syncing activities.

How does this help?

From saving lives on the possibility of prescribing a drug to someone with allergies, to understanding how the patient has reacted to certain medication in the past and full history of diagnoses to accurately subclass the patient, ergo administering a more effective drug.

We, at Pearl Data Firm, are using BioInformatics to understand human physiology through data, there’s lots more cool stuff going on in Genetics, and Microbial detection on our website.