The healthcare industry can be complex and puzzling for consumers with documents scattered between hospitals, doctors, specialists and insurance companies. Health Wizz Inc., the developer of a distributed ledger blockchain app, today announced enhancements to its mobile app that put more control of health documents into the hands of users.

The Health Wizz app was originally released in 2017 and is available on Apple Inc.’s App Store and Google LLC’s Android Play Store. With the mobile app, users can aggregate, organize and share access to their personal medical documents. It also includes features that allow users to make money off medical documents by providing special access, with privacy controls intact, to medical research firms.

Alongside enhancements to the Health Wizz app, the company also announced that the platform will be piloted at Cape Fear Valley Hospital in North Carolina in the next few months.

“The current state of healthcare is not patient-centric,” said Raj Sharma, chief executive of Health Wizz. “Despite years of rhetoric, patients have never been at the center of the U.S. healthcare system. They are not viewed as collaborators and have very little say in their own medical care.”

Updates to the Health Wizz app include a digital file cabinet, a social connectivity feature, a digital wallet for potential earnings and an expanded gift code system for rewarding users.

The digital file cabinet feature in Health Wizz is designed around the app’s original premise of giving users greater control and access to their own health records while protecting their privacy. It includes easy to use navigation and search capabilities that will allow users to collect, file and tag medical records from a mobile device.

The app has also integrated more social aspects designed to assist users in taking control of their own health decisions and create their own health-related challenges and campaigns. For example, users can chip in a participation fee in the form of OmPoints, the digital currency used by Health Wizz, to a “Challenge Purse” and compete using exercise minutes, activity metrics, diet tracking or other objectives to meet goals and earn incentive rewards.

Sharma said he believes that changing the way that medical records and health decisions are made by people requires users demanding access to their own records and being an active participant in their own wellbeing.

“When patients have a copy of their health records they become more aware and engaged,” Sharma said. “And engaged patients are healthier patients, as studies overwhelmingly demonstrate.”

To do that, the Health Wizz app uses a distributed ledger technology called a blockchain, an encrypted transaction log shared between numerous contributors designed to be tamperproof. With the blockchain, Health Wizz can permit users to provide private access to medical records to healthcare providers – such as doctors, hospitals and specialists – as part of their everyday healthcare routine or also to medical researchers to aid in the development of cures or tracking of population health.

In order to get a better understanding of how blockchain-assisted access to medical records can affect the health of patients, Health Wizz will pilot the enhanced capabilities of its app with the Chronic Disease Management program at the Cape Fear Valley Hospital in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

The pilot will run for 60 days and involve the participation of 30 patients. It will focus on Medicare beneficiaries with congestive heart failure, with the goal of reducing hospital readmission in the first 30 days of discharge by improving out-patient care, including streamlined communication between different caregivers.

According to studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than half of Americans are currently living with at least one chronic disease, while one in four adults has two or more. The CDC approximates that 86 percent of all healthcare spending covers people with chronic health conditions and the direct medical cost exceeds $760 billion annually.

“Eighty-six cents of every dollar spent on healthcare goes to treating or managing a chronic condition,” said Michael Nagowski, chief executive of Cape Fear Valley Health. “Technology tools like Health Wizz help to reduce inefficiencies and improve the ability to proactively identify risks and coordinate care, enabling to better treat and manage chronic diseases.”

Since chronic conditions take a lot of time and energy from patients and rely heavily on medical documentation for continuity of care. Health Wizz believes its app could represent a fundamental change in how users control and maintain their own medical records.

Aside from providing a touchstone for individual users to organize and control the constellation of their own healthcare information, Health Wizz also intersects with day-to-day personal health management and networking with caregivers.

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