Digital platform technologies have revolutionized industry after industry; like Amazon Marketplace, Amazon WebServices, Airbnb, Uber and Android. Healthcare remains one of the most attractive targets for digital platforms; it is massive, information intensive and lacks any dominant digital platform. Some of the biggest tech firms including Microsoft, Google have targeted healthcare for digital platforms with minimal success.

One of the most important requisites for digital platforms is millions of active users. Almost nothing else matters; without millions of active users, digital platforms fail. Digital platforms targeting healthcare have not attracted millions of active users. The digital healthcare platform that succeeds in attracting millions of active users will likely come to dominate healthcare.

The Universal Patient Index has the potential for attracting millions of active users. FormDrop is both its minimum viable product and its killer app. Merriam-Webster defines a killer app as “a computer application of such great value or popularity that it assures the success of the technology with which it is associated”. That’s what FormDrop can do for Universal Patient Index.

FormDrop fills out patient forms using smartphones and provides ultra-accessible blood tests. Both of these have high user demand with the potential for attracting millions of active users.

FormDrop can fill the stack of forms on any clipboard by simply clicking images of the forms and faxing the filled out stack to the point of care. The addressable market is over 700 million clipboards that users fill out each year in the US alone, over 75% of users express a positive intent to use this service; there is no known competition for filling these forms.

FormDrop provides blood tests direct to users that are ultra-convenient, ultra-affordable, and ultra-accurate by unleashing the massive analytical power of mass spectrometry on blood testing. Over 50% of users express a positive intent to use these blood tests; this demand has almost no segmentation – which is a requisite for an essential consumer product.

Filling forms and testing blood are information and identity intensive. Forms are filled from and stored in users self-sovereign health records. Blood testing is a means of transcribing information in blood to users self-sovereign health records. The Universal Patient Index is composed of the user’s self-sovereign health records and their self-sovereign health identities that correlate their patient identities distributed across healthcare. FormDrop is a means to store and use these self-sovereign health records and self-sovereign health identities.

In a recent blog, Paddy Padmanabhan points to the lack of active users and the lack of a universal patient identifier as characteristics of healthcare that have impeded the emergence of digital platforms: (https://www.cio.com/article/3404529/how-close-are-we-to-platform-domination-in-healthcares-digital-business-models.html)

The Universal Patient Index solves both of these deficiencies. FormDrop can bring millions of active users to the Universal Patient Index that resolves patient identity across healthcare. Through FormDrop, the Universal Patient Index can emerge as the dominant digital platform for healthcare.