As emTRUTH grows and we meet more people, I am often asked how emTRUTH started and why, especially since this is my second startup and the third for my co-founder, Ron Kong.
Building a startup is not for the faint of heart. It is a rollercoaster journey of highs and lows.
I am an extrovert with moments of introspection on happiness, fulfillment, and purpose. From my many, sometimes painful, lessons-learned and battle scars, I know I am happiest when doing something I feel passionate about. Passion, commitment, and the right people are, for me, key ingredients in a successful startup.
During one of these moments of introspection in 2017, as I researched the emerging technology landscape, blockchain held my attention with its immutable nature, where a block of data cannot be edited or deleted, only appended on a chain; like DNA is passed from parent to child.
Such a technology aligned with my personal values of trust and letting the data speak to inform our decisions. How could we harness this technology to better trust the process and trust the data? How could we empower people to own and control their own data, advance the trust they already have with existing partners and stakeholders, and use data for purpose?
Empowering truth was the genesis of emTRUTH.
Finding Our Value
Data is the heart of our digital world. I see so many industries and use cases that can benefit from empowering truth. Yet as a startup, we had to ask ourselves where and how we should focus our resources and priorities given this broad range of possibilities?
True to our passion and our purpose, we let the data speak.
As preliminary groundwork, we talked to stakeholders in different industries, gathering market and product validation data. Ron and I are problem solvers by nature. We like to listen and learn.
The Road Not Taken
Being able to immutably prove the authenticity of a luxury good was, we thought, an obvious choice of use case. However, as we explored our concept with luxury brand manufacturers, we quickly realized this was an incorrect assumption.
Consumers may care if what they bought was authentic, but brands did not view this as a priority. Perhaps imitation is the highest form of flattery. In any case, luxury brands are selling an image and an ideal. The luxury goods industry is also not an early adopter of technology, so while we rated product fit as an "A," the readiness for luxury companies to adopt our solution was rated a "D."
In 2018, we decided not to pursue the luxury market.
Foundational Technology for Many Industries
That data-driven decision enabled us to focus on a powerful use case that was resonating (via pilots) within the aerospace and healthcare industries – solving the problem of disconnected and siloed data for mission-critical applications.
Both industries rely on teams of people working together to deliver a solution. Both industries need data from many places, in many shapes and sizes, to do their jobs well. Both deal with confidential and sensitive data. Both share a common need to provide the right data, to the right people, at the right time. When it is most critical for the mission, or for a life.
Today, emTRUTH is the data platform for a NASA project. In partnership with another tech startup that provides next-generation system engineering tools, emTRUTH is enabling secure sharing and collaboration of rich and large system engineering artifacts, like a complete model of a spacecraft (i.e., a digital twin). Many engineers from many companies across geographies are all working from a trusted version of data, with emTRUTH as the single source of truth. Unlike cryptocurrencies that create a coin or token representing an asset, emTRUTH is blockchaining the data itself and advancing blockchain for distributed data management.
For us, data is the asset.
Why Healthcare
Like aerospace, healthcare has the challenge of disconnected and siloed data. Healthcare always has and always will need data from many different places in all shapes and sizes, because it takes a village of care professionals to provide you with care.
For example, if you break your wrist, the x-ray in the emergency room is needed by the surgeon operating on your wrist; otherwise, you will need another redundant x-ray procedure. The outcome of your surgery is needed by your primary care provider who also needs data from your outpatient rehab facility. All this diverse data in total is the digital picture of you as a patient with a broken wrist. Now play that scenario across every life-threatening health scare you can think of. Gestational diabetes. A heart attack. A lung cancer diagnosis. You can see how making sure your healthcare team has all the data they need - empowered by one source of truth - is critical to your outcome.
We found our value. Healthcare has a profound need, and the societal impact we could have made the decision easy. So, in 2020, we took a measured leap of faith. We incorporated and took in our first outside investors to protect our intellectual property.
At emTRUTH, we want to make a positive difference in solving real problems, not just in advancing technology but also in impacting real people's lives at their most critical moments.
emTRUTH's DNA
The journey is worth it, our momentum is building, and we encourage you to watch this space for some exciting announcements coming soon!
At the time of this article, our technology is patent pending. We are finding great satisfaction in the partnerships we have built with respected healthcare leaders who are helping us grow.
And we hope to continue meeting people who share our vision, especially blockchain for healthcare.
Trust the data. Trust the process. It is who we are and where we come from.
About the Author
Irene Woerner is CEO and Co-Founder of emTRUTH. Irene and Ron Kong (CTO and Co-Founder) chose to focus their foundational technologies in healthcare because of the meaningful impact they can have in improving outcomes while managing costs.
About emTRUTH
emTRUTH unlocks the power of healthcare data. We do this by making it quick and easy for healthcare users (who are not IT experts) to securely combine and share data on demand while they, and their patients, retain full ownership and control of their data. The company's patent-pending technology offers fast and secure horizontal or vertical data integration and interoperability of any type of data. With one API. From anywhere. Using any standard. To any app. In days, not months. For less. For more information, visit www.emtruth.com.