In a time when almost everything people knew about blockchain revolved around bitcoin, John Bass, the CEO and Founder of Hashed Health, envisioned how the underlying technology could transform healthcare. In early 2016, this was a radical connection. When its potential clients likely only knew of the technology because they paid a ransom using bitcoin, the idea that blockchain might ultimately save healthcare was easily dismissed. Nevertheless, Nashville, Tennessee, a town built on traditional healthcare, has now embraced Hashed Health as a star.
Hashed Health is a fast-growing Technology Company that leverages blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT) to solve healthcare’s most important problems. The company endeavors to build an ecosystem of businesses that organize networks of stakeholders around blockchain technology solutions which will, in turn, impact the cost and quality of healthcare in the U.S. and globally. Hashed Health believes that blockchain is the framework that will underpin the changes to value and delivery structures, enabling a more sustainable, patient-centric system.
From the CEO’s Corner
John is a healthcare innovator and an international speaker seasoned with two decades of experience in the healthcare industry. He has spent his career building businesses that help organizations realize value through collaboration in previously siloed areas. His earlier success stemmed from solving institutional issues around transparency, trust, and the alignment of incentives in a world before blockchain. Early on, John recognized that blockchain is purpose-built to solve these exact issues.
To start Hashed Health, a company based on a technology in which few people could see utility, he walked away from a CEO role at a subsidiary of the city’s most prominent healthcare company. “For me, blockchain was the first thing I’ve seen since the internet that has the opportunity to change the conversation around healthcare. All of these things that the blockchain has become known for can be applied to healthcare to solve some of these really traditional problems that we’ve always wrestled with,” says John.
An Innovative Organizational Structure
When Hashed Health was launched as a product company in 2016, there was no market for blockchain solutions. It had to create one.
“Our goal is to be a product company, but we had to build a market first. That was the interesting conundrum. Blockchain is not just about a product; it’s about a network. In order for a product to be meaningful, you have to have a network of participants ready to use that product and that means addressing both technical and non-technical concerns,” John said.
The Hashed Health model has three distinct, synergistic areas to launch meaningful products in its unique space.
Hashed Enterprise helps healthcare organizations and other companies understand how blockchain could affect their businesses, the drivers of cost and value for blockchain in healthcare, and use-cases appropriate for blockchain. Enterprise is the services arm of Hashed Health. Its customers include some of the largest insurance companies, non-profits, IT vendors, and government agencies in the US and abroad.
Hashed Labs is a team of blockchain healthcare product managers and engineering talent. They build product and work on innovative business models and governance structures. This team specializes in finding the sweet spot between a technical solution, an innovative business model, and a governance mechanism that makes a product come to life.
Hashed Collective is an open community-building forum for healthcare organizations, consumers, entrepreneurs, and developers to talk about blockchain applications for healthcare. Collective includes meetups, podcasts, webinars, newsletters, online educational resources, and other innovative community-building tools to help broaden the community of blockchain healthcare advocates.
These three areas of the company work in sync to support market-development activities alongside Hashed Health’s products and partnerships.
More than just a Technology Company
The core team of Hashed Health has their background in healthcare, enabling the company to stay on the front lines of Health IT, payment models, and care delivery. They understand the problems and the obstacles in healthcare and sees blockchain as a way to fix them. Blockchain, for Hashed Health, is not a technology in search of a problem. If a problem can be solved without blockchain, the Hashed team will be the first to say so. As a company, it is also platform-agnostic – for each application and each use-case the team looks at all available blockchain platforms and tool sets and then works with the stakeholders to pick the best instance for the problem at hand. The firm’s values are intertwined with blockchain’s core characteristics – trust, collaboration, transparency, and incentive alignment.
The Milestones in Its Journey to Success
The company just celebrated it two-year anniversary. From local meet-ups to co-hosting the world’s premiere blockchain-focused healthcare conference, Hashed Health has successfully led blockchain to its place as one of the hottest topics in healthcare. Travelling around the world, the team has presented and keynoted at major healthcare and blockchain events by invitation from major healthcare players and governments.
To add to its glory, the developers at Hashed Health have completed and won premiere hackathon events like ETHWaterloo and Discover Blockchain, to name a few. Individually, John has been awarded Nashville Technology Council 2017’s Innovator of the Year.
Strong-Willed to Better the Future of Healthcare
Currently, the company is building an ecosystem of solutions that address previously unsolvable problems. Hashed Health endeavors to create a portfolio of complementary and symbiotic applications that will fundamentally change healthcare delivery. With frameworks and marketplaces, it wants to allow the industry, constrained by legacy practices and technologies, to evolve without blowing up a system so many patients depend on.
“Starting from scratch is not an option, but the current system is unsustainable – blockchain is how this generation can evolve away from today’s healthcare infrastructure that is collapsing under its own weight,” John said.