Q&A with Aman Quadri

Originally, I started in tech in the late 90s when my friends and I we were getting into computers and hardware development; we were lucky to successfully sell it before the dot-com crash. After the sell, and looking at the landscape in tech, I decided to pivot and try a career in healthcare and followed in my father’s footsteps into physical therapy. I received my master’s degree and eventual doctor of physical therapy and began practice in 2002. As a practicing clinician, and given my family background, I noticed the inefficiencies and costly electronic record filing systems that burdened doctors’ offices and caused a string of duplicative paperwork. I found that when doctors’ offices are bought-up by major hospitals, they are forced to adopt the hospital record systems. Although this is for continuity, it does cause a drop in the number of patients a doctor can see in a day by more than half.

I had this idea of revolutionizing the healthcare records system, but this was in 2010 when it was difficult to enter the Electronic Health Record (EHR) environment, which was, and continues to be, monopolized by large companies with big marketing budgets. In order to compete and innovate in this space, I founded AMCHART in 2017, with my brother-in-law, Ken Parekh, the Founder of AMSYS Group, a nationwide IT Services Provider in healthcare and headquartered in Houston. We created AMCHART under the AMSYS umbrella with blockchain and cryptocurrency as part of the platform’s differentiating factor.

AMCHART is a medical record that is patient-centric and allows patients full control over their healthcare records. We utilize an incentive-based system to allow patients to earn tokens towards their health. Payers and providers see benefit by being subscribing entities in the system that will generate revenues for AMCHART through subscription-based services, such as under a SaaS based model. Also, as datasets grow and are utilized for AI and machine-learning purposes, AMCHART will allow paid data subscriptions from insurers, diagnostic entities, research institutions, and pharmaceutical companies who thrive on having access to up-to-date patient information.

The target audience for our platform is those who use Electronic Health Records, such as: physicians, doctors, hospital systems, healthcare providers, and large physician and insurance groups. We also believe that paperwork and records should be in the hands of the patient so they can take control of their health and carry over their records to the next physician.

The integration of older systems is the most challenging part. There are new technology blockchain companies working in collaboration to help bypass these issues and although integration could be difficult, there are technologies to help us conquer these issues. To our benefit, the older companies realize that blockchain technology may interrupt their space and we have been approached to buy these companies since competition will be difficult for them

A major challenge in any development process is ‘the speed to market.’ With our model, we are able to shave off the 2-3 years that it takes a typical Electronic Health Records company to go to market. We are ahead of schedule because we’re able to leverage existing technology from our developer network. We believe in leveraging and outsourcing talent and technology within our umbrella to maximize time and minimize cost. For instance, our app was developed by one of our contractors, but it wasn’t actually created for AMCHART at first. The app was created the medical community in India but when that community didn’t accept it, they shelved it. We saw the great app and bought it, saving 9 months of the development curve.

We also had our data science team join us from the Texas Medical Center in Houston. We’re ‘new to the game’ under this particular name, but as a company, we have been around for 15 years. The relationships my brother-in-law has cultivated made it possible to create this large network. Whenever we are in need of something, we send out word to our network, and we easily get an inbox full of ideas and technology contributions from our community within no time.

We found that blockchain technology is not expensive when one has the right development team. We built a web-based, subscription-based model for doctors and hospitals where the user pays a monthly fee to have access to a patient’s permissioned data. The cost for subscribers for hospital systems to integrate with blockchain technology is tenth of the price because it’s web-based, efficient to implement, and works on this SaaS model. There are no servers, or software that are needed to integrate AMCHART. If the older system contains a lot of patient records, we would build an interface on the existing system so that you can move over records over time and get rid of the older one completely, which is the only cost associated to integrating AMCHART for that particular client type.

We’ve designed this is through a hybrid model. The information that is inputted goes up the chain where it is fully protected and logged. The data goes into a private blockchain or hyperledger platform. We are utilizing what we call a secondary permission access, which identifies the person before giving access. This two-step authorization process also keeps a log of who accessed what file at any given time.

We are also going to tokenize our blockchain to incentivize patients to see their doctors and take control of their health. Instead of manually going to the doctor’s office to get blood pressure tested, you can monitor your blood pressure into our system and receive tokens through connected devices such as a FitBit, Apple Watch, blood pressure machine, blood sugar monitor, etc. These tokens can be exchanged for other cryptocurrency or be used with our loyalty system partner to go shopping or travel.

There’s nothing wrong with licensing or buying out technology when it’s all about speed to market. We believe in collaboration and incentivizing other companies to work with us. For instance, there’s a young company in Austin trying to incentivize the elderly community to take their medication on time. We’ve utilized our technology to help them and in turn, they are licensing their technology to us, which benefits us as we have added another module to AMCHART to make sure patients come first.

Apple was not the first company to create the tablet (iPad). They were just the first in taking the right partnerships and marketing initiatives to get it to lead in the market-place. If we get our system out there, we may not become number one, but if we are in the top 5 by working with others to get there, then the health care space will greatly benefit from this collaboration.

My goal is to make health records transportable, up-to-date, accessible, and to better position how patient data is used in healthcare. The difficulty in seeing patients and making money is unnecessarily complicated. When I left my practice, the rule of thumb was to see more patients to make less money. As we move towards value-based payments and physicians/hospitals use our system, we can keep patients out of the ER/hospitals reducing the money payers spend on healthcare and passing the savings on to physicians with increased reimbursement. I feel like our job is to change how healthcare information is shared and used.

Our total raise is $100M. We’ve already raised over $12M by word of mouth from friends and family wanting to partner with our established blockchain company. We are seeking to complete our pre-sale round at $45M by middle of February, during which, in this round, ICO contributors will receive a 25% discount per token purchased. The minimum investment we are taking is $25K from accredited investors. Our target investors are high net worth individuals, family offices, hedge funds, small to large investment funds, and healthcare investor groups.

Our mission is to decentralize healthcare for people to have universal access to their own records, so they can carry them anywhere so that doctors can make the best decisions. I want to see patients’ health improve and for people to proactively take control of their own health. We have a great team at AMCHART that wants to see this goal become a reality.

We have been in the field during our development and research, but now we are eager to gain more exposure and to unveil ourselves to the blockchain and healthcare community. After our raise, we will be focusing on pushing our product to market so we can enter healthcare systems and hospitals.