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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.
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.
As a physician for > 30 years, I can tell you that the ship has sailed on privacy of your medical records a loong time ago. In the 80s, my senior partner's office medical records still consisted of brief notes jotted on index cards. This basic situation of written or dictated notes, on paper, which were copied and mailed or faxed, really began to shift with the wider adoption of EMRs only in the last 5-8 years - prompted by government diktat and financial penalties. In the hospital, it was all hand-written charts until EHRs became commonplace over roughly the same period.
The driving force for EHR/EMRs is, of course, money. An electronic record can be audited more easily, screens applied, and payments denied. If you go into the hospital and sit in the nurse's station, you would see the medical record perused by doctors, nurses, pharmacists, LPNs, nurses' aides, PTs, OTs, lab techs, venipuncturists, and unlicensed employees of utilization review, quality assurance, billing and insurance preauthorization depts, etc. Not to mention remote access by doctors offices and all the apparatus of the out-patient utilization review, quality assurance, billing and insurance preauthorization, and govermental auditing (Medicare/Medicaid). There have been many many revealed instances of people viewing and distributing info from the charts of spouses, girlfriends, etc. And, this leaves aside the millions of medical records exposed by compromises and hacks of hospital and insurance co. databases. And, I'm sure the NSA or other TLAs have scooped all that data as well.
There really is no privacy to your medical info. But if you want to believe that, fine.