A Fireside Chat featuring Ed Bukstel and Jody Ranck
Key Takeaways
The ICO (initial coin offering) bubble burst, failing to provide a funding mechanism for blockchain healthcare companies. However, several blockchain healthcare companies have survived and continue to build out their solution offerings.
Government (Health and Human Services) has adopted blockchain for better contract management processes. Government may become one of the principal drivers of blockchain adoption over time, as they utilize blockchain and AI to improve processes and gain insights for negotiating government contracts.
Additional uses cases that remain strong case studies for blockchain include: traceability in pharmaceutical supply chains, provider registries, and consent management in clinical research. Regulatory changes for pharmaceutical supply chains are creating opportunities for traceability applications. Blockchain can also be of value when competitors need to create a common resource for the industry to innovate or remove bottlenecks without jeopardizing intellectual property and resources.
Introduction
Several years ago, amidst the surge in interest in blockchain applications in healthcare, Chilmark Research published our own report on trends and companies in this space. We recognized it was still the early days, and there was a tremendous amount of hype but few demonstrable results. Then came the ICO craze, with companies scrambling to find ways to tokenize various healthcare business functions. It did not turn out well.
Recently, I spoke via podcast to Ed Bukstel, an early adopter and developer of blockchain tools, to get an appraisal of the current state of blockchain activities in healthcare. This post provides a summary of that discussion. You can listen to the podcast above, and read a full transcript below this post.
The Post-ICO Blockchain and Healthcare Space
It is easy to make a mockery of the speculative bubble of the ICO period; however, there were a number of companies with serious business models and teams attempting to deploy blockchain in innovative ways.
SimplyVital Health is one good example that even had John Halamka as an advisor. Their business model looked at using blockchain to improve access to data for providers across networks. This would improve care coordination and help a healthcare organization meet the needs of value-based care contracts and bundled payments. The problem was less the business model and more an issue of the SEC considering the ICO a security. The ICO raised, $6.3M, had to be returned once the SEC ruled that it was a security and that the investors were not accredited investors.
A number of companies that received a great deal of attention for their ICO programs are still in existence. SimplyVital Health and a number of other early entrants have survived the SEC ruling and continue to move forward. For example, Patientory went on to raise $5.3m from traditional venture fund sources. Consensys Health also announced a recent collaboration with Dixon Center for Military and Veterans Services focused on a decentralized health and social services network with next generation privacy protections.
In a similar vein, I was personally involved with the Swiss-based healthbank, a personal health data storage and data transaction platform that also attempted to pull off an ICO rather late in the game and has had a difficult time gaining enough traction to become a fully viable company. Aggregating data at the individual level for clinical research is proving to be a steep hill to climb; blockchain alone is often not enough to scale-up to a viable business.
Health and Human Services, Regulatory Drivers, and Blockchain
In 2018-19, HHS under CIO Jose Arrieta began using blockchain to get a handle on the large number of decentralized contracts while removing unnecessary bureaucratic hindrances. HHS connected their five main contract IT systems utilizing a blockchain approach. This allows them to build an analytics layer on top of these systems to provide better insights for managers of contracts.
Another area where government regulation will likely drive adoption of blockchain is in the area of pharmaceutical supply chains and tracking proof of provenance. The US drug supply chain security act (DSCSA) requires all supply chain stakeholders to implement reliable measures that improve product traceability, the actual implementation of DSCSA will be in a phased manner by the year 2023. Blockchain’s traceability and proof of provenance as well as chain of custody capabilities will be well put to use for compliance with DSCSA requirements.
Co-opetition and Collaborative Networks
Another use case that Bukstel discussed involves how blockchain can facilitate cooperation among competitors. These commons-based approaches allow sharing of data, while not giving up the entire store. A good example is physician registries; out of date physician information can result in errors that impact delivery of care, reimbursements, etc.
Recent HHS rules require payers to provide current, up-to-date directories for their members. In 2017, Humana, Aetna, Lab Corp, Quest Diagnostics, and other competitors came together to form the Synaptic Health Alliance.
In 2018, the Alliance launched their first project to update the physician registries in their networks utilizing a blockchain infrastructure that would pull together the registries from all of the organizations. Provider demographic data is non-competitive and non-proprietary, therefore a good initial use case to demonstrate the value of blockchain in addressing a type of data bottleneck or administrative burden. The initial pilot identified up to 88% of the necessary data corrections, including identifying inactive sites and address mismatches, which are the most common errors.
Figure 1: Synaptic Health Alliance
Conclusion
The market has clearly moved beyond the “Blockchain as a Buzzword” era where it was viewed as a panacea for many of healthcare’s woes. While cryptocurrencies and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are all the rage beyond healthcare, we have yet to see these blockchain related technologies find compelling use cases. On the fintech end of the spectrum, we may see cryptocurrencies used in the future if they become mainstream financial vehicles. We will likely continue to see interesting use cases of blockchain and AI coupled for building longitudinal records and different types of data exchange and analytics platforms, such as HSBlox, that we covered earlier this year. If you would like to follow the full podcast of our conversation with Ed Bukstel you can read the full transcript below or find the audio above.
Jody Ranck: [00:00:10] Hi, I’m Jody Ranck, and I’m a senior analyst with Chilmark Research, and today I’m joined by Ed Bukstel, who’s been one of my go-to experts on blockchain over the years. And we’re going to be discussing blockchain in health care: where we’ve been in the last few years and where we think we’re going in the next two or three years and perhaps beyond. Thanks for joining me today, and thanks to all of you for listening to our podcast today. And if you’re interested in signing up for a Chilmark Research newsletter, you can go to chilmarkresearch.com or if you’d like to follow up with me personally after hearing this podcast, I’m at jody@chilmarkresearch.com.
Jody Ranck: [00:00:52] So Ed, we last spoke about blockchain actively publicly several years ago at the Blockchain Health Care Summit that I used to be involved with helping organize. And you were a speaker/participant in several rounds of that. A lot has happened, that was back during the ICO craze, which everyone knows sort of petered out and didn’t live up to the expectations we had. But there’s still some activity in blockchain in health care. So why don’t we begin with you giving us a little intro about your background and how you got into blockchain? And then we can get into some questions about where the market’s going for the blockchain applications in health care.
Ed Bukstel: [00:01:31] Jody, thank you very much and thank you also to Chilmark for hosting us. Yeah, that’s thinking back to that conference in Washington, D.C. it just seems like generations ago, especially in blockchain years and what’s going on in crypto. You’re right, the ICO craze was in full steam at the time, and I think, you know, you had brought on some very interesting speakers into the event talking about all things blockchain, I think, and I believe you also made an introduction, which is now one of the very interesting blockchain initiatives today between United Healthcare Group and Humana and folks that were speaking at the show.
Ed Bukstel: [00:02:15] Just by way of background, I’ve been involved in health care for the majority of my professional life, going back about 25-plus years, and was involved in creating clinical information system standards, as well as the standard which ended up becoming the clinical side of HL7 with the ASTM 1238 standard. But the blockchain just provided for me — given the reference points in my career — a chance or opportunity to address some of the issues that I think some of the traditional health care systems and technologies were having a real problem with. And one of the chief among them is the issue of patient access, patient control, patient consent and an overarching need for transparency and security. And you know, blockchain seemed to check those boxes in a way that attracted me to the technology. And as I said, we’ve seemed to have already gone through multiple generations. The ICO craze has came and went and we’re onto bigger and better things. And I think, blockchain today, as was back at the Washington, D.C., conference and into the future. I think it’s not necessarily an overarching architecture to build your systems 100 percent on, but I think it’s a tool. Technology, much like programmers would utilize Java, but it’s a tool technology that’s just kind of another arrow in your quiver to create a more robust application set.
Jody Ranck: [00:03:47] And just to go back to that ICO era. However short lived, it was health care in contrast to some of the broader ICO offerings, or you had a lot of speculation, scams and so forth. We actually had some companies, at least on paper, sounded quite strong, but ultimately we had issues where companies had to give back the funds raised during the ICO and so forth. Can you shed light on that? And kind of was it primarily the SEC not ready for this new way of raising capital via the ICOs or what happened? Some of the companies that we had at the conference were doing quite well and getting quite a bit of attention, but I think a number of them are no longer in existence. And why did that happen?
Ed Bukstel: [00:04:38] Yeah, that’s actually one of the one of the most impressive companies that I saw was at the conference and first became aware of this group. That was called SimplyVital. And I believe there were out of Connecticut and there were some affiliation, I believe, with New Haven. I think John Yale, New Haven Hospital, I think John Halamka was one of the advisors and they seem to be doing all the right things had some very worthwhile technology to deal with value based care. I think the CEO, she was just absolutely tremendous with her presentation. I actually I remember writing a blog post about it and saying, you know, we could be looking at the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
Ed Bukstel: [00:05:18] But you know, I think ultimately with the ICOs, you know, the FCC didn’t necessarily know how to handle it. And ultimately they came down pretty aggressively as viewing the ICOs as securities. Now, you know, some of the really good companies like SimplyVital and Patientory is out there, a group out of Atlanta. Yeah, they’re still alive. In fact, I think they received some traditional funding from a venture capital group out of Oregon, but they also were participating in the ICO market as well. I know the values, as the ICOs kind of fizzled, I know the valuations on a lot of these companies that were ridiculous under the ICO model, those valuations definitely came down to Earth. But yeah, Patientory is another example of a company that’s still alive and kicking and doing some work. Although not necessarily displacing the legacy vendors, Epics, Cerners, Allscripts, Clinical Works, et cetera of the world.
Jody Ranck: [00:06:16] It’s funny, we think about those valuations now and then you look at back then and now you look at the valuations and the traditional VC world and investments that have happened this year and the SPACs and fees and so forth. And it’s funny how we get these big swings back and forth. Then you’ve got to wonder about, you know, potentially, you know, digital health bubbles in the present and near future. Moving beyond that, I know you’re have been keeping up on some of the movements and activities that are still ongoing with blockchain, and some of them sound quite interesting. And maybe first begin with an example with health and human services. So government using blockchain? What’s going on there and how are you interpreting that?
Ed Bukstel: [00:07:04] Well, that’s actually one of the more interesting examples of of an actual project that made it past the pilot phase and is actually operational, for being able to identify the folks that are placing bids to the government and making a heck of a lot of transparency. In fact, as of February 2020, they believe that they they’ve saved about $30 million by by instituting this application. Obviously, the business case has to be in place, but this was a pet project of the former CIO Jose Arrieta, and he used a lot of the data that HHS was creating, or had with regard to the proposals and bidding processes in order to basically put that information out there and make it available. It’s a really interesting process and you know, the savings are there. There’s the potential to create potentially billions of dollars of regulatory savings when they incorporate AI to the blockchain effort. So it’s a very interesting project and I think it’s worthwhile keeping tabs on.
Jody Ranck: [00:08:19] And I know there’s some sort of regulatory changes and happenings in the pharmaceutical sector as well, in particular with the tracking and tracing. Any insights on what’s going on there and sort of the pharma use cases, at least on the supply chain front?
Ed Bukstel: [00:08:36] Yeah, there’s a whole tracking, and I believe the regulation actually goes into effect in 2023, which is an entire program that needs to. It’s mandated by the federal government and this program is one that will make sure that the ingredients are tracked, the temperatures of products are tracked and it’s a surveillance monitoring program that will truly be ideally suited for a blockchain technology and transparency efforts. There’s absolutely no question that this will provide a heck of a lot of visibility, and I think you would had a really dynamite group of folks talking about that at the conference and in D.C. also. The issues of having transparency, being able to track the drugs throughout the entire supply chain tracking chain of custody. All of these types of issues are even more pertinent. I think today is we have and we are still dealing with the COVID situation,
Jody Ranck: [00:09:49] And fraud is also a big issue in a lot of emerging markets where you have 40-50 percent of malarials. I’ve seen in some markets are counterfeit. So I know there are a lot of use of sort of IOT labels and blockchain together to help consumers identify authenticate the. Really, the medications they buy at the point of sale, so I think applications like that are really useful as well
Ed Bukstel: [00:10:16] To track the provenance and authenticate the provenance, making sure that cold chain has not been interrupted. You know, all of these these issues are absolutely critical for pharma as they come into compliance in 2023 and well, it’s frankly something that the pharmaceutical companies need to be doing right now, and it will be government mandated in 2023. I actuall was talking with a friend of mine that works with one of the big pharmaceutical companies, and apparently they were doing an inventory of all of their freezers and cold storage devices and things of that nature. And they actually found a ham sandwich in one of the devices that was meant to store medicines and vaccines.
Jody Ranck: [00:11:04] Contaminant identification or audits?
Ed Bukstel: [00:11:06] Yes, absolutely. It’s pretty crazy.
Jody Ranck: [00:11:10] So one of the other areas I’ve always found quite interesting is just this general ability to collaborate across the boundaries of the firm and enhance cooperation even among competitors where getting them to collaborate may be win wins for everybody, and you don’t have to necessarily exchange all of your your data with your competitors or reveal that blockchain has a lot of advantages over existing methodologies, databases and so forth where you have different parties collaborating. Do you see anything interesting? You mentioned in the intro, the Postsynaptic Health Alliance that some of those parties were at that blockchain summit and what are they about and what are they up to? What do you see going on?
Ed Bukstel: [00:12:01] Well, I mean, actually, it’s very, very interesting. The folks from United Health Care and Kyle Krueger from Humana, they met up, actually met up at your conference. So you kind of were the tinder for these guys to hook up. But they’ve they’ve got a very interesting application and what they came together, not only with Humana and United, but also Multi Plan Quest Laboratory. I believe LabCorp is involved as well. Aetna is also one of the groups.
Jody Ranck: [00:12:34] Quest and Labcorp.
Ed Bukstel: [00:12:37] Yeah. Which I mean, monster competitors, they just are viciously competing with with each other. And, you know, the blockchain ends up creating some cooperation for these folks on dealing with something that we’re all familiar with, which are the issues of provider directories. You know, you have doctors, which are notorious for having the wrong addresses. I’ve had multiple friends say, you know, they’ve thought that the office hours that were posted and the provider directory were correct. It turned out they were wrong or the provider had moved actually to another location, or was in another location at those hours. And there was actually one office had been closed.
Ed Bukstel: [00:13:23] And the issue of just having identifying a physical address and the problems that are encountered by these organizations, you know, we’re not talking about millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars; it’s estimated to be a two plus billion dollar problem. That is a recurring problem, and it needs to be constantly updated. And what these folks are doing, is they’re sharing their information in order to have a better–for lack of a better phrase or term–a better truth about the location, whereabouts, existence of providers and where the doctors are, what their actual physical addresses, what their telephone numbers are, what insurances they may or may not take at a particular given point in time, the hours of operation.
Ed Bukstel: [00:14:13] And if you think about it, the information could be extremely useful because if a physician has moved, let’s say, and is no longer at a particular office, obviously that information from Quest or LabCorp is going to be extremely, extremely pertinent and timely because these folks are going and actually visiting the location in some cases every day. Or I know some labs that have their couriers pick up multiple times in any given day from a specific location. So obviously, if the physician is no longer at that location, being able to record that on a ledger and broadcast that information to other folks is going to be extremely meaningful for plans and people that help administer health care and benefits, but ultimately, at some point in time when that information becomes patient facing and consumer facing, you know that information will be helpful to make sure that patients don’t waste their time going to a location that does not have a provider.
Jody Ranck: [00:15:18] Then claims get spit out and things like that, then cause delays and sort of messing with the patient journey in certain ways as well.
Ed Bukstel: [00:15:26] Jody, you’re one hundred percent right and that becomes a major situation for patients. And also if, believe it or not, they still use the mail. So people actually mail claims and mail eligibility information, in some cases to a location and the mailbox. If it wasn’t set up for forwarding or even if it was, there could be multiple delays. I mean, we’re seeing some significant not just supply chain delays of getting packages, but I know folks that are having 10 to 20 day delays on on receiving mail, just going from from the Philadelphia area to Florida.
Jody Ranck: [00:16:01] So another area that I thought would be useful to chat about is just looking at what’s the bleeding edge right now? And one of the companies I’ve been looking at and written about on our blog is HSBlox. So they have their CureAlign platform, you know, they basically are combining AI and blockchain in different ways where they’re building out a longitudinal record. They have NLP capabilities, natural language processing that can even pull out Spanish terms from the EHR and social determinants. A lot of unstructured data that very, very high percentage of the data in the EHR that’s unstructured, making that more readily available, but at the same time, integrating social determinants data into that record as well and using blockchain as sort of the privacy consent management tool.
Jody Ranck: [00:16:59] Because if you look at social determinants, that’s another layer of privacy risks, security risks that are outside of the health care system and you have vulnerable populations. So doing more to protect those folks’ data and privacy, I found that rather interesting. And they’re also getting work in the pharmaceutical clinical trials down in Argentina because of the Spanish language capabilities, things like that. So that’s one of the more robust blockchain examples I’ve seen. But it’s not all about blockchain. It’s a lot of different tools: financial fintech, coupling all these pieces together and blockchains, just one thread in the whole mix there. My impression is that’s the future of a lot of this. It’s not just a blockchain story, but never really has been. But when it was all new and shiny, we focused on blockchain. So what are you seeing? Does that make sense, what I just described? Or seen any other examples along those lines that coupling AI and other tools to create something quite interesting and potentially quite valuable.
Ed Bukstel: [00:18:10] Yeah, I think the AI combined with blockchain is absolutely where this type of technology is going to shine. I’ve used the example that we have folks that are now looking at AI as being a key differentiator from one institution to another. And the the thought process is, you know, we’re going to see AIs rolling out from different hospital systems and providing encyclopedic type of analyses on an individual level for patients. Now the issue ends up becoming what how does a patient now make–it’s tough enough making a decision right now with the insights that one institution might provide versus another if choosing where to have a surgery, for instance, or where to go for chronic care or cancer care, and trying to decide who or what entity is the best fit and an ability to link blockchain as a platform to an AI that may be connected with one or more institutions and then have a kind of an authoritative look of what makes sense, because everyone’s going to basically come out and say, I think I believe at the end of the day, they’re going to be the the AI is ultimately going to have a bias towards whatever institution puts it out, whether it’s University of Pennsylvania or Jefferson Health here in Philadelphia or Cooper Hospital and in Camden, they’re all going to say, “Well, you should get your cancer care here.” How does the patient make that decision? So and adding certainly adding the social determinants of health makes perfect sense.
Ed Bukstel: [00:19:49] I think going forward, we’re still looking for that breakout application or technology that is going to demonstrate that blockchain will fulfill some of the promises and, you know, certainly the AI coupling makes sense. I keep on thinking back to, you know, everybody was sitting there. A lot of folks around the world, we’re sitting there saying, Why is this internet important? This is back in the day and the application that made everyone realize that internet can be important and having data instantly accessible can be important beyond having a transfer mode for emails or a backbone for making sure emails can move back and forth was when FedEx introduced tracking. And when that came out, a lot of people would just go and constantly hit refresh on their computers to see if their packages had moved and how far along and it was. And that was the light that went off in people’s heads. And we’re still looking for kind of that FedEx moment. But certainly the example of linking A.I. and other patient health information to a platform makes perfect sense.
Jody Ranck: [00:21:02] You’d think with that growing value of real world evidence, health data economies and then this issue of trust, it’s out there, whether it’s with AI or how people’s data is being used more broadly, even beyond health care. And you look back a few years ago when we were thinking about ICOs and it’s all about tokenization and how you can give people control over their data. You know, I was an executive at Health Bank during that period, working on their program for their ICO. They’re a health data transaction platform with a co-op business model that’s all about putting together some fundamentals of trust so people could store their data and trust in the privacy of the institution, but then also be part of that health data economy and be rewarded for sharing their data into clinical research and things like that. But we ultimately did not succeed, and having great intentions of protecting consumer privacy, giving them some return on their health data. We weren’t big enough. Now the big platforms, it’s hard to compete when you’re a startup with the likes of Google and so forth. But then now there’s growing suspicion of the Googles of the world as they go into health care and Amazon and so forth. Do you see any role? Could the Health Banks of the world return in some other form? Or what do you think? Discussions around tokenization seem to have gone a bit quiet, but now we’re talking about NFTs.
Ed Bukstel: [00:22:35] I guess I’m an eternal optimist, but I guess I’m a pragmatic optimist. I agree. We were looking at tokens, I think, in in the wrong way or a vast majority of folks. We’re looking at tokens in the wrong way, and there were just kind of applying it as an airline reward program where, you know, if you give your patients will suddenly move or do something or act if they get some token. And I think we’ve seen that the world of health care in the United States is a little bit more complicated than that. And just having a token is not necessarily the way to create a motivation for patients.
Jody Ranck: [00:23:13] So but there’s network effects, too. That’s a part of it, too. When you’re a small player and you’re trying to get data individual by individual versus being able to hoover up millions of health records from an EHR. That’s the the big difference there.
Ed Bukstel: [00:23:31] Absolutely. I think, you know, going back to the legislation that has been put out there, for instance, a government legislation which is, you know, really causing changes, which is the tracking pharmaceutical supply. I see those types of things as being some of the potential game changers. I think also, as we saw the government with the Affordable Care Act was able to create massive change in the health care system. I think we also will see something along those lines with other legislation that’s come down the pike. And one aspect, I think, is the No Surprise Act which goes into effect January 1, 2022. I think there is a need for transparency, trust and tracking what an individual believes they owe or what a provider and a plan or agree on the cost of a procedure and making that transparent. So I think that is very interesting.
Ed Bukstel: [00:24:34] But, you know, hitting on something that you mentioned, I think from a patient perspective, the NFT presents a very interesting point of view. And I had I’ve had a few discussions with folks about that, about the non-fungible token and how it’s been used in the art world and folks who have created it as a holder of value for various types of creations, and kind of went through the the mental gymnastics thinking about how that might apply to a person’s medical record and how each individual is essentially a work of art in and of themselves and has their own uniqueness, and there may be fundamental things, just like any painting for the most part, is going to have a brush stroke. Any individual is going to have certain vital signs that will be common. But as more patient generated data is added to the picture, then it becomes much more individualized than there could be something there. You know, I haven’t thought about specifically how that might be able to be aggregated or monetized for the patient to benefit. But I definitely think there’s something there, Jody.
Jody Ranck: [00:25:50] On the other hand, you know, health IT, we have a lot of cynics and they’ll look at this and say,”Hey, isn’t this just ICO 2.0?” Because remember, Wired ran that article a couple of years ago about how much is your data worth?
Ed Bukstel: [00:26:04] Yep. 17 cents.
Jody Ranck: [00:26:07] The old expression, “X plus 50 cents will get you a latte.” Well, you wouldn’t even even have gotten a latte. I think the average person’s data was worth 30 cents. Just for the skeptics out there–really? Do you think, how is that going to happen? What’s the scenario in your head?
Jody Ranck: [00:26:23] Maybe we’ll close with–in the eternal optimist mind of Ed, how could we break through from some of these kind of structural issues where you know that data of an individual going back to that Health Bank example, we had a hard time getting people to pay for that when we were accruing people one at a time because the value of one person might be useful if that person is in a good precision medicine center and needing, you know, an oncology treatment for that N of one in a genomic database or, you know, some kind of omic thing. But in terms of a market and a platform, it’s a very steep mountain to climb.
Ed Bukstel: [00:27:06] Yeah. Jody, haters going to hate. But you know what? The pragmatist in me would say, yeah, there are going to be challenges. And some of the challenges may seem insurmountable. But one of the things that reminded and I guess for those folks as we head into the holiday season, people say that “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie–I think it was Die Hard 2–where they were trying to break into a vault. And the magnetic seals were engaged, and they needed the electricity to be taken down for an entire city grid. And the villain basically said, “I give you the FBI” because he’s playing exactly by the playbook. And I would say “I give you the federal government.”
Ed Bukstel: [00:28:02] I believe the legislation, such as the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Security Act, believe legislation such as the No Surprise act that is mandating transparency and not the BS that we see on websites that are just spreadsheets of unintelligible pricing. The government is at some point in time, they’re going to actually get real, and it looks like there’s some actual teeth here that especially for the pharmaceutical companies, you know they’ve been preparing for this day. Heck, there were companies that were formed back in 2018 just preparing for 2023. I think with the No Surprise act, I think there’s the mandates and the legislation and the penalties for not doing the right thing are going to force organizations to take a much closer look at blockchain platforms and technologies and the folks that like us that in many, many times we probably felt like we were screaming in the wind in the wind on a very cold and lonely mountain. I think the government will make that mountain a little less lonely and a little less windy.
Jody Ranck: [00:29:16] I agree, there are definitely some very interesting use cases throughout the health care ecosystem. And in some ways it’s very refreshing now not to have all the hype around blockchain and have a fresh look and keep hacking away at some of these use cases. And you look at AI and federated learning for use in some clinical research and things like that. There’s certainly a role for blockchain types of platforms to facilitate that and enable more granular consent management and better privacy security controls, things like that. So definitely with you on that, despite some skepticism about some of the use cases we’ve been through. Given the war scars I have from trying to build something around this years ago.
Ed Bukstel: [00:30:08] We all have those battle scars. I think you and I both know where some of the bodies are buried.
Jody Ranck: [00:30:16] All right, Ed. Well, on that note, thanks. This has been an illuminating discussion and really appreciate your time. And for our listeners, you can also look towards the Chilmark Research blog. I’ll be putting together a blog post and have links to some of the companies and stories we mentioned throughout this if you’d like to pursue some of these areas in more detail. And with that, we’ll close and thank you very much, Ed.
Ed Bukstel: [00:30:42] Thank you very much, Jody. Take care. Good talking to you.
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