In brief
- Several California public charter schools will use a blockchain-based app for tracking COVID-19 symptoms and spread.
- The app, Team.Care Network, is developed by healthcare infrastructure firm Solve.Care.
- Distributed ledger technology has been used in other COVID-related solutions.
The Collaborative Charter Services Organization, which provides administrative support to several California public charter schools, announced today it will implement a blockchain-based system for tracking COVID-19 infections among teachers, support staff, and students as schools ramp up in-person instruction.
The organization will use Team.Care Network, an app designed by blockchain healthcare infrastructure firm Solve.Care, to track the individual health and wellbeing of members across the educational community. The schools are currently focused on online-only education, so the rollout of the program will begin with on-site staff before expanding to teachers and students as they return to in-person learning.
Initially, the rollout will include California Pacific Charter Schools in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Sonoma counties, as well as MY Academy in Orange, Riverside, San Diego, and Imperial counties, along with the organization’s home office in San Marcos. Those facilities comprise more than 100 employees and about 1,000 students.
By using the app, which is compliant with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), administrators will be able to tap into and make decisions based on analytics, allowing them to trigger mitigation plans in the case of positive COVID-19 cases.
“In the first application of blockchain technology in a day-to-day school setting, public California charter schools can create a safer space for students and staff while ensuring data privacy concerns are addressed through our privacy-preserving blockchain-based application,” said Solve.Care CEO Pradeep Goel, in a release.
Team.Care Network has also been adopted by Florida’s Angel Kids Pediatrics healthcare practice to help manage COVID-19 reporting by its employees across seven facilities in the state. Solve.Care’s blockchain healthcare platform, which uses Chainlink oracles, is also behind the Global Telehealth Exchange, which aims to make it easier for patients to find remote doctors.
Blockchains and similar distributed ledger technology have emerged in other technical solutions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the UK’s South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust recently announced that it is using software based on Hedera Hashgraph to actively monitor the temperatures of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine throughout storage.