Save Lives - Earn Bitcoin with new EMS SignPost Software

Have you ever wanted to be paid - in Bitcoin, to help save lives?

Cincinnati-based EMS SignPost is developing a system that connects EMS personnel to critical, up-to-date medical data. EMS SignPost's parent company, EC Link Inc., has a track record of implementing Bitcoin tech in some its products. They want their new product to compensate those who help keep the system current.

Disclosure: Garrett Keirns, the author of this piece, is employed by EC Link, Inc. as an independent contractor.

The backbone of the system is an NFC embedded magnet. The magnet links to a unique - and encrypted - URL that hosts a person's medical data. The data includes medical history, current medication, and physician and family contact information. Another important feature is the ability to upload Advanced Directive documents such as "Do No Resuscitate" orders and power of attorney paperwork that can be critical to EMS personnel during an emergency. Users can sign over administrative rights to friends and family. This feature is especially important for those who aren't technically savvy.

Currently, the EMS SignPost system is running in a few, limited jurisdictions. However, there are plans for expansion. The target buyers are Fire Departments and municipalities. There is an annual licensing fee to cover hosting and development. The fee increases linearly based on the population of the area served. And, of course, this fee can be paid in Bitcoin as well as fiat. 

The developers plan to add a bounty program that rewards contributors – in Bitcoin – to keep medical information current. The exact amount of money paid out is unclear. A proprietary algorithm is being developed to identify the most high-risk people in the system. The higher the risk – the higher the payout. The Bitcoin bounties give participants (or his/her family and friends) an incentive to maintain the system. The EMS SignPost developers expect hospital, insurance companies, and local governments to help finance this bounty program. New United States Medicare laws penalize hospitals for repeated Emergency Room visits. The new rules create an incentive to treat and diagnose problems correctly the first time.

The Bitcoin blockchain will also provide reliable time stamping to verify the integrity of documents uploaded in the EMS SignPost system. Applications like Proof of Existence demonstrate how information embeds itself into the global decentralized Bitcoin ledger. A cryptographic hash of the document latches on the blockchain. The cryptographic alphanumerical string can only be reproduced with the presence of the original file.

EMS personnel are being trained to take on a greater role in the field. This trend is especially true in rural and impoverished areas. Community Paramedicine, as it is called in North America, is the concept of equipping EMS crews with the correct tools – technological and legal – to carry out this new role.

The company plans to offer more than just refrigerator magnets for citizens using their program. They are also pioneering the use of NFC-embedded bracelets and wallet cards. To maintain HIPAA compliance in the United States, EMS SignPost developers take security seriously. Only authorized personnel can view and edit patient information. Two-factor authentication programs, already popular in the Bitcoin community, will protect accounts from unauthorized logins.

What do you think of Blockchain based EMS info and NFC capability?

Image Source: EMS Signpost

The Power Of Decentralization For Consumers

In the current age of digital technology, the digitization of nearly everything has led to some incredible innovations and increased efficiency and cost reduction for modern day business. Because the marginal cost of an additional unit of a digital good/service is nearly zero, businesses can save a lot of money as time passes by using digital goods or services for the necessary functions of their business. If a corporation pays for proprietary software, they will likely pay a fixed cost, one that will be quite high, but the marginal cost of an additional process or use of that software is or is close to zero.

Also read: Digital Technology to Exponentially Disrupt Business

What isn't always obvious is the fact that businesses that are saving money in their cost-effective strategies are also passing those savings on to consumers. One important thing to note is that innovation drives consumer benefits. When technology improves, and something new is invented, consumers receive an extra benefit. That benefit can be an increase in quality of life or extra savings. If a firm is in a perfectly competitive market, there will be no profit in the long run, and that firm will offer their products at the lowest possible cost to consumers. If the firm finds a way to save on production costs, those savings will eventually be passed onto consumers.

Even if a corporation is in a non-competitive market, savings will be passed on to consumers if that company finds a way to decrease operation costs.

Decentralization does something even more unique, it takes innovation and puts it into the hands of the people, providing them with increased benefits and security. One of the reasons that projects based on the blockchain are so powerful is that customers or users of those projects are given the decentralized power of the blockchain plus whatever additional power the project/service gives them.

Decentralization has many benefits for consumers. Because these projects/services are digitized, they are already cheap to use. Becuase these projects are decentralized, they are more secure than services that rely on centralized servers.

Bitcoin is such a powerful invention due to the fact that it puts people in charge of their own finances (for free), cuts out the middleman and makes the cost of sending money to anyone in the world close to zero. Sending money via wire transfer to a foreign country (even relatively small amounts) can cost upwards of 5% while the cost of sending a large Bitcoin transaction is close to zero. Bitcoin provides people with the means to take control of their finances and have better control over their money. When projects are built on top of the blockchain, consumers receive some incredible benefits that are greater in scale when compared to a corporation saving money in their production costs.

What do you think about decentralized projects/services? Comment below! 

 Images: Pixabay

Digital Technology to Exponentially Disrupt Business

Technology is expanding in power exponentially. Continued new innovations and ideas continue to disrupt many industries. Processor speed, video quality, bandwidth, and more are all increasing significantly, so much so that modern businesses now depend on it for almost all of their daily activities.

Technology is allowing numerous startups to quickly scale their business to an industry giant in only a couple of years, boosting productivity and strategy management to unparalleled levels. Airbnb is set to become the largest Hotel chain in the world, without owning a single hotel. Uber has grown, in two years, to now control 65% of San Francisco's taxi business. In addition to the ability of creating business empires in a short amount of time, also comes the potential of artificial intelligence and robots to replace 47% of U.S employment within the next decade.

What's Causing these Changes?

The answer to this question is digitization. Almost everything can converted to digital format and made available to any amount of people instantly. No more taking copies of a paper to everyone in the office, upload it and hit send. Digitization brings about a new era of efficiency in terms of both speed and cost effective nature

Bitcoin itself remains one of the strongest contenders if the trend of digitization continues to remain an important aspect of innovation and business practices. An important thing to note about how digitization reduces cost is the fact that the marginal cost of sending an additional digital asset is close to zero. This applies to data, files, emails, and other things on the corporate level. Think about it like this, there might be a fixed cost of using a service, but once that service has been used a certain number of times, then the cost to use that service to send an additional asset becomes roughly equal to zero. To businesses, reducing marginal cost is essential to creating more cost effective methods of operation.

Bitcoin has an edge as a payment option due to the fact that it does not have any fixed costs (unless a payment processing company is used) and that transactions can be bundled together for additional transaction savings (if they aren't required instantly. Regardless, the Bitcoin network gives users the options to move funds very cheaply, and with incredible speeds when compared to traditional payment methods. As mentioned before, it is the digitization and cost-reducing aspect of technology that is increasing business efficiency and growth over short periods of times, this makes it likely that digital money will become increasingly popular, and businesses will likely want to shift to faster and cheaper methods than most currently use. Automated Clearing House technology is still used by a lot of banks, technology that was developed in the 1970's. ACH bunches transactions in predetermined intervals and clears those bundles at the same time, taking up to 5 days. Digital payment options that reduce cost and increase speed have the ability to significantly disrupt the finance and banking industry along with new technology which will shift the way business is done altogether in the coming decade.

Source: Forbes

Image: Pixabay

Using the Blockchain for the Digitization of Business Practices

In the past decade, modern day business has focused on the digitization of data, payments, and business practices. The result has been reduced cost of operation, increased speed of information, payments, and communications, and an overall increase in efficiency. Businesses that optimize the amount of processes and information that can be digitized reduce costs and increase the efficiency of the entire firm.

Think about it like this. If a business were to use digital technology to send a memo around a large office electronically rather than deliver paper copies to each employee, that business would be able to save the time needed to distribute a hard copy of the memo around the office (which could be used to do something else productive) they would save the money for the paper and ink, and everyone in the office would have instant access to that information.

Similarly to office memos, each time a company chooses to send an invoice to a customer, they save on paper and ink, as well as the postage cost when they choose to send the invoice electronically rather than physically. Email technology significantly reduced operating costs for businesses and increased the speed and efficiency of business communications.

Blockchain technology has the ability to significantly increase the speed in which digital payments are done as well as significantly reduce the costs. For large payments and invoicing, most companies turn to payment processing options that take care of customer payments, but the fees and speeds of those transactions can be improved.

Many large businesses have ignored implementing Bitcoin payments, but as we have seen over the past few months, many firms are taking up Blockchain technology and leaving Bitcoin behind. Blockchain technology offers significant speed improvements over Automated Clearing House (ACH) money transfers. PayPal offers instant payments, but it still takes 3-5 days to deposit a PayPal Balance into your bank account.

By digitizing payment solutions and implementing peer to peer networks of payment systems, businesses can implement faster and cheaper payments and order processing solutions without the use of Bitcoin itself. Accepting Bitcoin does not have very many drawbacks in general as Bitcoin payment processing companies offer very cheap payment processing and instant conversions to fiat to avoid the Bitcoin market fluctuations that previously scared off businesses.

Just as digitization significantly improved communications within business, the speed and cost of payments will likely decrease over time as peer to peer network technology is continually implemented.

What do you think about the digitization of Business payments? Do you think Bitcoin itself or just Blockchain technology will drive this shift? Let us know in the comments below!