Tierion Tackling Healthcare with Block Chain-Backed Datastore

Tierion just completed its first block chain project with Philips Healthcare, according to a tweet from the company's Co-Founder and CEO Wayne Vaughan. The tweet did not provide any other information but noted that more details would be forthcoming next year, Philips Healthcare is a unit of Netherlands-based electronics giant Philips, which offers a wide range of products for doctors and medical facilities, including a number in the area of informatics.

The Hartford, CT-based startup, which launched at the beginning of September, has developed a scalable platform - Chainpoint - for storing proof of existence of data in the bitcoin block chain (though Chainpoint has been designed to be block chain agnostic). Data can be sourced from web or mobile devices via REST or HTML Forms, as well as integrated from web applications using the third party Zapier service.

With Chainpoint, source data records are hashed and collated into blocks, which themselves are hashed to form a Merkle Tree, with the Merkle Root stored in the block chain. A receipt is generated for each source data record to prove that it is a constituent of the Merkle Root that was committed to the block chain.

As well as Vaughan, Tierion's management includes Co-Founder and Lead Developer Jason Bukowski, and draws on Shawn Wilkinson of the Storj decentralized storage project as an advisor.

As well as applications in healthcare, Tierion has also built a demonstration of an insurance claims processing system and has worked with the State of Connecticut on a proof-of-concept to store survey data in a block chain.

With an emphasis on enterprise-scale applications, Tierion's offering, technology approach and focus is similar to that of Factom, which has also worked with early stage customers on government audit and healthcare applications.