The Blockchain Mindset with Dr. Alex Cahana

In this virtual, remote, distant world we need to make sure that the technologies that support us can transfer information that is accurate, safe and trusted. For today’s episode, we had Dr. Alex Cahana join us to speak about the role Distributed Ledger Technologies will play in shaping business, health systems, and definitions of community in the post-pandemic world. Dr. Cahana is the Chief Medical Officer and Market Lead for ConsenSys Health. His experience is in military, healthcare and most recently, blockchain, and he believes that by ‘blockchainizing’ healthcare we can transform people from passive health service consumers into active, self-sovereign health and wealth producers. In today’s show, we discuss the importance of secure, trustworthy data to business and healthcare and how blockchain-based systems are ushering in a new era in this regard. Dr. Cahana tells listeners about what blockchain’s ability to remove ‘fakeness’ means for securing systems in health, law, news and more. Our conversation also covers the global pandemic and what it has emphasized, what we can learn from it, and how technologies that are being implemented now might be here to stay once things blow over. A key takeaway here is that surviving the pandemic should not come at the cost of our privacy. We discuss his efforts with “Failure Is Not an Option” (FINO) as far as their ventures toward reshaping business through blockchain, and the incentives blockchain could provide to people so that they can take a more active role in their own healthcare. Most importantly, Dr. Cahana’s message is that blockchain is a mindset. It represents a mentality where we realize that we have to work together and it enables a behavioral economy which makes things so secure that trust gets taken out of the picture. Tune in for Dr. Cahana’s big picture, cross-disciplinary insights.

“Blockchain is a technology or software solution that solves the problem of ‘fake.’” Key Points From This Episode:

• An introduction to Dr. Cahana and his work in military, healthcare, and blockchain
• Blockchain, distributed networks, and public/private business partnerships in the last month
• The role that Distributed Ledger Technology can play in monitoring supply chains
• Blockchain’s ability to stop ‘fakeness’ and how this applies to medicine, news, law, etc
• Combining blockchain with other technologies to keep health data private in the crisis
• Business, contact tracking, privacy: how blockchain and AI could shape the new normal
• Weighing the severity of concerns between non-specialist doctors and practitioner trauma
• What blockchain can do to relieve the issue of health practitioner trauma
• What FINO is doing to create new business models: ‘trustless’ blockchain systems in a post-pandemic world
• The evolution of technology and whether we will learn from mistakes that caused COVID-19
• Metrics to know whether our efforts to change are successful: a token economy
• The lasting effects that technological solutions will have; homeostasis vs allostasis
• Creativity, reflection, blockchain: three good things to come out of the crisis