Researchers Suggest Using Blockchain For Electronic Health Records (hbr.org)

The CIO at a Boston teaching hospital and two MIT researchers write in the Harvard Business Review that blockchain "has the potential to enable secure lifetime medical record sharing across providers," calling it "a different construct, providing a universal set of tools for cryptographic assurance of data integrity, standardized auditing, and formalized 'contracts' for data access." An anonymous reader quotes their report: A vexing problem facing health care systems throughout the world is how to share more medical data with more stakeholders for more purposes, all while ensuring data integrity and protecting patient privacy... Today humans manually attempt to reconcile medical data among clinics, hospitals, labs, pharmacies, and insurance companies. It does not work well because there is no single list of all the places data can be found or the order in which it was entered...

Imagine that every electronic health record (EHR) sent updates about medications, problems, and allergy lists to an open-source, community-wide trusted ledger, so additions and subtractions to the medical record were well understood and auditable across organizations. Instead of just displaying data from a single database, the EHR could display data from every database referenced in the ledger. The end result would be perfectly reconciled community-wide information about you, with guaranteed integrity from the point of data generation to the point of use, without manual human intervention.

Comments

Re:How do you Store a 5gb MRI image

[frank_adrian314159]

And what do you do when you need medical data expunged from the record? It's difficult enough as is today, but still doable in cases like wrong diagnoses or a doctor or nurse logging to the wrong journal. But you can't modify a signed chain without breaking it - that's the entire point.

Yes. It is the entire point. But you don't remove data from an EMR (Electronic Medical Record). Working with them on a daily basis, I can tell you the "removed" bits and "reason for removal" fields in their databases have a reason. You always add to the record, even if it is a removal. That is, you do if you and your customers value their legal skins.

Re:How do you Store a 5gb MRI image

[Kjella]

Yes. It is the entire point. But you don't remove data from an EMR (Electronic Medical Record). Working with them on a daily basis, I can tell you the "removed" bits and "reason for removal" fields in their databases have a reason. You always add to the record, even if it is a removal. That is, you do if you and your customers value their legal skins.

That's the default, yes. But at least here in Norway you have the right to have information that is found wrong or unnecessary and strongly burdensome not only corrected, but actually expunged. Usually it involves possible substance abuse, child abuse, psychiatric diagnoses or something like that and the burden of proof is on you, it happens very rarely but it does happen from time to time. This is more a legal process around the registration of personal information than a medical process and you can appeal beyond the institution that logged it. Generally though the duty to document is very strong, even if what they thought or did was incorrect that's their basis for action and review so for example if you want to sue for malpractice that should be done first. But even if this happens in only one in a million journal entries, it's pretty incompatible with a blockchain.