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

How do you Store a 5gb MRI image

[hsmith]

In a 256 bit hash? I'd love to know. Block chain can verify data - that is it. Tired of dipshits selling the latest buzz word when they have no idea what it is. Block chain is ledger, not a fucking database.

Re:How do you Store a 5gb MRI image

[arth1]

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.

No, I think this is a very bad idea.
A git-like approach would be a better idea, but that requires a dedicated merge master who can vet pull requests. And I sure as hell would not want that to fall on an insurance company, and they sure as hell would demand it.

How about this radical idea: The patient owns and controls data about the patient, and takes the consequences.

Re:HL7

[jbmartin6]

HL7 is just a messaging format, doesn't provide for audit, nor does it scale well across a large number of recipients. Unless you want every hospital and doctor to maintain records on every person, and maintain a VPN to every other hospital and doctor.

Privacy?

[jbmartin6]

While the articles has mentions "protecting patient privacy" this isn't explained. It is hard to see how a widely distributed ledger of medical records would be anything but a privacy disaster.

Re:Public?

[GLMDesigns]

The blockchain concept is perfect for YOU to store your medical information (or any other information). The issue is distributing the keys to doctors, insurance, gov't etc...

You can store (and add to,) your records easily; and nobody can see it without knowing your "VERY_SECRET_PASSWORD".

But now, here's the problem. How do you disseminate the information to others? And how do you do this if you're in a coma?

Then someone else needs access to this "VERY_SECRET_PASSWORD". And who is that? The government? Insurance companies? That is the problem. Not securely storing it on the blockchain.