COCO

The Coco Vision

The Vision

Free medical and personal records for everyone everywhere for life.

Starting with developing countries and community clinics as a SaaS community led network and eventually going to everyone o the planet with a combination of open source software and web 3+ (blockchain).

We will help the most mobile and the most needy. From refugees and diaspora to expats and digital nomads.

We can’t train doctors or build hospitals or manufacture medicine but we can make great software that helps save more lives and improves even more.

The Opportunity

Web software-as-a-service services today are often provided free of charge for example –

  • communication with email or chat by Apple, Google gmail/com and Microsoft office 365, and like
  • services trading marketplaces from airbnb.com, fiverr.com, upwork.com and freelancer.com

Together they serve billions of people everywhere. These companies at the vanguard of innovation have become THE neutral enablers of communication and collaboration for community and commercial use. They are digital infrastructure for the world.

Coco sits at the junction of health and wellness, retail and ecommerce, communication and business systems with adjacent opportunities for partners in digital financial services, logistics, professional services and more.

Coco takes a fresh approach to old problems enabling all parties to ‘see’ common single-source of truth records according to your privacy needs including patients, carers, family, friends, professionals, population health analysts and the wider market of service providers.

The Problems

Today there is a very strange disconnect in our modern world, lots of people have medical records and most have mobile phones.

Most systems are also designed by developed nations for developed nation scenarios. But developing worlds have different resources, needs and paradigms for example the doctor or hospital is often difficult to access due to distance or demand so local alternatives and triage are more important.

But those records, your records, are very narrow in almost every dimension –

  • They are rarely ‘for’ you. Filling out duplicate forms many times with the same information has become accepted but is actually dangerous in terms of data quality, data duplication, single-source-of-truth, delays and wasted time for everyone. Further they rarely discuss personal preferences, your preferences, they only focus on what others have decided you need based on symptoms, conditions, treatment paths or standard processes.
  • They are not held by you even though this is information about you. You don’t hold them or see them most of the time which is odd and even a little perverse. It certainly misses an opportunity for education, validation, informed decision making and even meaningful debate and engagement.
  • Those that do hold them rarely share them (even though many laws and guidelines in developed countries especially encourage or even demand sharing).
  • Those that treat you often don’t read them because they are too busy, too time constrained, the records are in the wrong or inconsistent formats or languages and even more so if they are wrong they might make a mistake and get negative impact or even sued for someone else’s poor record keeping.
  • The records are usually incomplete, not always updated or shared and they are only for very specific treatments by very specific professions certified by very specific institutions (many people find life is better through a broad range of services like the local mid wife or community nurse, mentoring, stretching, diet, exercise, acupuncture, yoga and much more).
  • Many more people simply don’t have access because of socio economic or geographic constraints.
  • If good records were available and able to be appropriately shared, care would be faster and better targeted certainly improving productivity and maximising quality of life but potentially saving a substantial number of lives.
  • Records are often subjective or recorded ‘after the fact’ reducing detail or accuracy and introducing room for error in capture or in comprehension. This is partly due to workload but also procrastination because no one wants to waste time or use difficult old technology.
  • Existing records are limited deliberated to give some for of control by the administrators (eg quality or commercial goals are common but poor design, old technology, practical time constraints, training etc are also common issues. This may be a private hospital, a local government, a national government, an NGO/INGO or other institution or community body. All of which are well intended but reach limits rapidly.

Who Will Use It?

Eventually, anyone in the world could benefit. In the short term it probably looks like a mix of these groups –

  • University Student in developing nations and their families and eventually their communities.
  • Startups in health, wellness, professional and semi-professional retail initially developing nations but once the feature set fills out the the freemium value equation becomes clear this would expand to developed nations.
  • Community Clinics, general practitioners, solo professional and semi-professional providers and carers in developing nations and their patients/customers and their families and eventually their communities.
  • Medium and larger community groups in developing nations and their familes and friends in same or other locations.
  • Medium and larger hospitals, clinics and specialist institutions. Each coco organisation on the system is an SME but it can also be a department of a larger entity with consolidation and discrete but visible operations eg inventory of a hospital pharmacy vs ward supplies are distinct but procurement needs to see both.
  • Wellness and other semi-professional health services in normal retail in developing world and developed world alike.
  • Expats, digital nomads and tech startup founders and their teams working remotely. This includes the web3 community and the crypto community.
  • Local, state and national jurisdictions.
  • Large scale retail and franchise networks

How Does It Work

With Coco, information about you is yours. Your information is always in your control on your phone and in the cloud.You can see who has access, who has looked and can control what they see at all times.

Our rollout looks like this –

  • Stage one is a normal Software-as-a-serve (SaaS) web service in your browser on any device from phone to tablet to desktop and eventually on cars and health equipment. A central server instance keeps track of community level servers across the network to ensure services levels are met by each node.
  • Each node can server anyone anywhere. The centre encourages distribution of load, capacity and upgrade rates.
  • Patients, carers, families and friends encourage each other to use the service so they are ‘covered’ (connected, contactable, informed) in the event of an emergency or other less pressing need. Communities (like universities, local groups) encourage each family to join. Over time the real value is in the proactive benchmarking, insight and health issue prevention and optimising education.
  • Community clinics, doctors, service providers, hospitals, well and eventually most retail can benefit from time and simplicity savings.
  • All parties start free and selectively upgrade for more capacity or features based on need and economic circumstances.
  • As people moved around or businesses deliver services virtually like telemedicine or personalised education/advice, the network automatically optimises location of data for security (eg a conflict area), latency (performance), privacy, features etc.
  • Gradually the top-down central SaaS model gives way to bottom-up community actually operating/running or perhaps just financially sponsoring a third party to operate our open source software driven nodes and eventually a DAO web3 style service using blockchain as the speed and efficiency of those models improve with time.

Funding Sources

We will trial various funding methods but expect these to be the main sources of operating capital for this for-purpose organisation. In rough order of current focus.

  • NGPO/INGO/Foundation grants to start and community support eg Patreon.
  • Grants by Larger foundations eg Jack Dorsey’s Start Small.
  • Freemium subscriptions form businesses and individuals who want more features or capacity eg. profitable expat beauty clinics vs rural community clinics.
  • Transaction based revenue from payments to clinics and other businesses by patients, carers and families made via us and our payments partners.
  • Transaction based revenue from services marketplace commissions. eg find book receive acupuncture, dentistry, yoga classes, physiotherapy, general practitioner consult, elective surgery.
  • Referral models and partnerships.
  • Equity and equity alternative investments by VCs and other investors

Context

Trillions of dollars are invested and churned through our core industries. But dfor some reason not many people are effectively helping developing nations. We aim to change this situation. Learn more –

  • South-East Asia – E-conomy SEA 2022 report by Temasek, Google and Bain & Company $1T GMV by 2030 growing at at least double current GDP
  • Africa Report – Rise of digital economy in Africa

Need More?

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