| Notes |
The city of Austin, Texas believes there is a better way. Over the past year, the MyPass Initiative—a partnership between the city of Austin, Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services, and Dell Medical School at the University of Texas—has been working to develop a blockchain-powered ID system for people experiencing homelessness. The Initiative is funded by a $100,000 grant from The Mayor’s Challenge, a competition sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies that awards grants to innovative cities, and the planned end-product is a platform that gathers digital copies of an individual’s records and IDs under one cellphone number or email address, rendering physical copies redundant.
According to Anjum Khurshid, the Director of Data Integration for Dell Med’s Department of Population Health, the idea came from similar programs implemented in refugee camps, such as World Food Programme Building Blocks in Jordan, which keeps family accounts on a “permissioned,” or private, variant of the Ethereum blockchain. Khurshid became interested in such use cases because the problems they addressed were analogous to one of the biggest in the world of population health infrastructure, namely the widespread fragmentation of health data. This fragmentation is exacerbated in the case of individuals who use emergency services frequently while lacking the IDs necessary for threading their history together—a common occurrence among the homeless population. |