Jonathan Holt – Ing

Dr. Jonathan Holt

CMIO at ConsenSys Health

With 20 years of experience, Dr. Holt leverages a comprehensive and holistic approach to genetics, clinical medicine and informatics to solve difficult problems in healthcare. He is a triple board-certified clinician with deep insights into medical informatics, distributed systems and standards development and has been at the center of the application of blockchain  in healthcare for the past few years, both strategically and through hands-on work.

Prior to joining ConsenSys Health, Dr. Holt founded TranSendX, which is focused on building cryptographic identity that enables interoperable verifiable credentials.  In addition, he was the Executive Vice President/Chief Medical Officer/Chief Informatics Officer at Seqtech Diagnostics, LLC. In this role, he developed novel bioinformatic algorithms for use in next-generation DNA sequencing to combat cancer and food fraud. He continues to serve SeqTech Diagnostics as Secretary on its board of directors.

Dr. Holt is also a contributor in standards development and has volunteered as a domain expert for the HL7 clinical genomics working group, as well as an invited expert to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). He also provides oversight and guidance to the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) Database and Information Technology Advisory Committee (DITAC), representing the American Board of Genetics and Genomics (ABMGG) and contributes to the Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain work groups.

Dr. Holt received his medical degree from the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine (DO). He began his residency with a traditional osteopathic rotating internship before completing an Internal Medicine Residency at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Francisco, California, followed by a residency in Clinical Genetics at the University of California at San Francisco.  He holds a master’s degree in biomedical informatics from the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Dr. Holt is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics and is triple board-certified in Internal Medicine, Clinical Genetics, and Clinical Informatics (American Board of Preventive Medicine).  He is a former faculty member of Stanford University’s Department of Medicine and Vanderbilt University Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine, Division of Genetic Medicine.

Dr. Holt is also a proficient programmer and won the BitFiniti prize at the Distributed Health Hackathon hosted at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center. He was also the co-organizer of the DC Blockchain Summit Code-a-thon in collaboration with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the U.S. Department of Health of Health and Human Services.

FIRESIDE CHAT with David Koepsell: "Your Digital Self and your Actual Health: Blockchain, DiD, and EHRs"

Time: Thursday, September 3, 11:30 am (-3 GMT)

ABSTRACT:

Health and digital identity are intertwined. Several billion people worldwide lack adequate access to their identity, much less their health records. Without state-recognized legal identity, the poorest cannot take part in the economy in any meaningful way, and without access to their health records and data, they are similarly disenfranchised from their own well-being. Blockchains are providing new mechanisms to leap-frog state-disenfranchisement, and to bring to everyone equal and productive access to identity, unleashing their abilities to own property they only inhabited before, or to borrow and access capital to build upon their labor and ingenuity.

Blockchains can provide trusted proof of title, validating indicia of ownership, and making it more difficult for states to deny their poorest equal participation in its institutions. The same is true for health. By combining the twin problems of inadequate proof of identity and adequate access to and control of health records and biomedical data, a whole new avenue for participation in one’s own individual health, and the world’s rapidly growing biomedical data economy, blockchain and AI-based technologies offer us a liberating and enriching force for rapid change.

This is especially exciting and promising where legacy systems are still largely paper-based or even non-existent and where sovereigns embrace the potential of these technologies to transform their economies and recognize our instinctive rights of self-direction and control of our data and health.