Medical Tethered Money
 .When it comes down to it, most of the action in health care is taking pills. Four billions prescriptions are written annually in the United States, an average of 13 prescriptions per person. The WHO published a staggering error rate in taking those billions of pills: 10%-30%!!! Hospital nurses are oveworked, home bound patients are confused and absent minded, psychiatric patients get out of control -- the public health impact of something so pedestrian as swallowing pills is mind blowing. Same for the solution. The BitMint solution is a Pay-per-Pill regimen using "tethered money". Your healthcare provider preloaded your phone with BitMint digital money which can be used only for the particular drugs prescribed for you, and only within a small window of time before and after you are scheduled to swallow that pill. It is this high-resolution, target-tethering power of BitMint that on its own brings us so much closer to the goal of error-free medicine. If you forget to buy this evening pill by bringing your smartphone to proximity of the lock-box at home, where you pay for the pill, and the box drops it to your tray, then your phone will alert your healthcare provider. And if you are in psychiatric care, such skipping of medicine may be dangerous, so the response will he swift. BitMint pay-as-you-go, per-pill-tonight is a dramatic cost saver by eliminating pay-and-not-use, and voiding the need for accounting labor, invoices, collection. It is also, perhaps mainly, a monitoring device. If you pay per pill per time of use, then if you don't pay -- you send a message to someone who could intervene and prevent a health problem down the road. BitMint tethered money is per patient, per pill, per time of consumption of each pill. It's the marvel of digital money. You can't take the wrong pill because your phone is not preloaded with money to pay for it. You cannot buy a three-months supply of prescription pain-killers then sell it on the black market, because you never get a bulk of pills, only one pill at a time, when you need it. The tethered money for this particular pill is not usable before that time and definitely not at a later date. In the hospital nurses will use the hospital-supplied patient iPad to pay for this shift pills, and thereby prevent drug administration errors. The smart device will alert for a missing expected pill, and there will be no pay for an unprescribed pill, put forth in error. Here too, much less accounting headache, no invoicing, little room for fraud. The simplicity of pay-per-use, when-you-use, as--little-as-you-use, is such a potent solution! I's combined impact on health care management and more importantly on eliminating health care crises is a good reason to pitch in. |
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