AMA-Invested Company Launches Blockchain Network-As-A-Service Platform

Akiri, a San Francisco-based spinoff of healthcare company Health2047, is launching a blockchain-based network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform to the entire healthcare industry.

According to an announcement from the company, development is currently underway for its initial product, Akiri Switch, which officials say is a subscription-based data network that “enables any type of health information to move seamlessly and securely throughout the U.S. healthcare system.”

Akiri was the first company to spin out of Health2047, an integrated innovation enterprise whose founding investor is the American Medical Association (AMA). Formerly known as Health2047 SwitchCo, the new company began with a $10 million Series A investment, a core group of founding executives, and what officials call a “significant market interest in its open approach to building trusted infrastructure for private data transport.” Now Akiri, the company has quickly built out its engineering bench, attracting engineering talent from Apple, Cisco, GE Healthcare, Stanford, VMWare, and other recognized market innovators, they attest.

The platform will be a vendor-agnostic solution using software-defined network (SDN) and secure routing protocol technology optimized for healthcare data. It employs blockchain technology to help securely transmit information through a standardized system of codes. The company's first collaborator is Celgene Corporation, according to the announcement.

With the goal to facilitate the flow of healthcare transaction data in real time, Akiri Switch's benefits look to extend beyond those offered by health information exchanges (HIEs), extract, transform, load (ETL) processes, and electronic medical record (EMR) systems, according to company executives.

"We must advance and embrace new technologies that have the potential to create truly meaningful market impact at the system level," James L. Madara, M.D., CEO of the American Medical Association, said in a statement. "The data liquidity problem that physicians and other healthcare stakeholders currently face needs to be solved because it's one of the biggest barriers to improving the patient-physician relationship."