“Never Stop Learning to Advance Yourself” - The Story of Dr. Quy Vo-Reinhard, Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer at the HIT Foundation
She has worked in drug development and medicine for 15 years. She has always wanted to benefit the society and assist people. She has learned about blockchain from books and experience. Today, she helps people and solves the problem of lack of access to medicine. She is the Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer at HIT Foundation – Dr. Quy Vo-Reinhard.
We have talked with Quy about her career in health data, discovery of blockchain, her company and future plans.
“To learn about blockchain – read, trade and do things”
I learned about blockchain by reading lots of books, doing trading, and learning by doing.
My in-depth knowledge comes from various sides: from database to machine learning, from high-performance computing to data processing. Big Data also helps me to advance the knowledge in the blockchain IT architecture.
To advance, never stop learning, never stop educating yourself and learn from everyone.
“My international experience helped me with my career”
Before joining HIT Foundation, I was a lecturer in various universities in Germany, Canada and Vietnam in Computational Biomedicine, Bioinformatics, Programming for Biologist, Drug Design. Then, I became a co-founder of a startup in enzyme development with a young team in Germany.
I would say all of the experience is useful in my career: my interdisciplinary background, international experience, combination of technology and business.
“The hardest challenge for any company is to work productively without enough people”
Now, I am a Co-founder and Chief Data Officer at HIT Foundation. I am responsible for utilization of healthcare information as an asset via IT different means. Among them there is architecture building, data validation and privacy, data processing, analysis, data mining, information trading and pricing in blockchain, and others.
As a founding member, I work with the team to recruit partners and raise funds.
The hardest challenge at work, like in any startup, is to have a lot of work done without enough people to finish that. Fortunately, we have a wonderful team to support each other with a clear vision and mission.
“Data is coins of the upcoming times”
As you know, Data is the Currency of the Future, and CDO is on the rise in regulated industries. HIT Foundation is a global platform, and every country has its own regulation on data and health data. To build a strategy for health data, integrate it inside our IT architecture and execute it to comply with the regulation in different countries is a real challenge.
To be clear, HIT Foundation is not a data center or data holder, it is an incentive system for people to digitize and monetize their health data, at the same time to leverage blockchain technology to ensure the data transaction happens in a secure, anonymous and transparent manner.
“My team and I provide a unique healthcare solution for emergency situations”
HIT has an architecture that allows off-chain data to remain with the individual user. At the same time, a match according to the individual’s data can be made. We also do not penalize individuals, especially patients, to pay to store their data which gets monetized without any benefit flowing back to them.
My company provides the healthcare solution being directly supported by and built on NEM which is well-suited for healthcare, for instance, in emergency situations. Due to its mobile multi-sig wallet, the individual’s designated trustees can manage their health data when they are unable to do so themselves.
The existing NEM components allow HIT a fast time to market along with comparatively low transaction costs for our users and partners. My team and I are predominantly building on public blockchains albeit we can offer hybrid solutions in accordance to local laws and jurisdictions.
Then, I have a strong team who are experienced, with synergistic skills, each having a track record in our area of expertise from healthcare to software development, from finance to data science. Our advisory boards are industry experts and we’re backed directly by NEM blockchain.
And last, but not least, we already have our alpha release before doing our ICO, and many partners from hospitals to healthcare service and companies. We care about sustainable growth and take time to build a trustworthy platform.
Finally, I think any startup should have three components for success in the blockchain market:
- sophisticated token economy;
- short time to market;
- speed of execution.
“With HIT Foundation, I reached the point of happiness”
In short term, my company plans to execute the platform globally, as currently it focuses on European and Asian market. After the initial setup and the end of the 5-year expansion phase, the platform would turn into an autonomous application that would run on the public NEM blockchain. The goal is an active community that builds their use cases and businesses on the top of HIT and develops HIT further.
At that point, the main tasks of the foundation will be governance and active community management. Running a public blockchain consisting of nodes only dedicated to HIT makes it extremely attractive to healthcare stakeholders that want to run blockchain applications.
Being in the company, I would say finally I found the Ikigai point of my life. It’s where happiness happens.
“I want to help women in Vietnam to welcome the technology”
As for my own personal plans, blockchain for supply chain in agriculture might be my next project. This industry lacks transparency due to the lack of interoperability and inconsistent or unavailable data – areas where blockchain can counter these inefficiencies and add new value.
Moreover, I plan to start my own project to help women worldwide, especially in Vietnam to close gender gap, change the men’s perception and help women to embrace technology.
“I want to help people and bring benefits to the society with blockchain”
I dedicated my life to deliberately bringing innovation into society where everybody shares benefits equally. I have worked in drug development and medicine as an IT person for 15 years, as well as in blockchain for healthcare.
I hope to build a solution that can help people. Around 3.8 billion people lack access to medicine because of poverty. We (HIT Foundation) hope that we will help to partially solve this problem.
Dr. Quy Vo-Reinhard will be a speaker at the Blockchain & Bitcoin Conference Switzerland and will talk about the tokenization of health data.
