Blockchain Technology: Making Medical Records Accessible and Secure

Medical health records are important to healthcare providers in order to provide proper services. However essential they may be, oftentimes access is difficult and insecure. With ready access to your auntie in Peru through FaceTime, and fruit shipped to your doorstep in twenty-four hours, we should not suffer our medical health records to be dinosaurs. The solution to the inaccessibility and insecurity of these records would seem to researchers to lie in blockchain technology.

Blockchain technology was first introduced in 2008 by an online persona by the pseudonym Takashi Nakamoto, as a way to rule out counter party risks in monetary use without a central authority or middle-man to trust. The cryptography utilized in blockchain has the potential to tick all of the boxes for a decentralized, private, and highly scalable health record system, which would not suffer from the ailments of current models.

Modern electronic health record systems already exist, but lack robust security and widespread interpretability. Ransomware attacks are symptoms of a problem in how our institutions manage sensitive information. Ransomware is malignant software that lies dormant and spreads through as many computers as possible, then bars access to the use of computers as leverage for money. Most famous, perhaps, in recent memory is the WannaCry attack in England in 2017. England’s National Health Service, running a 15 year-old version of Windows, had patient medical health information immobilized behind a paywall after falling prey to such ransomware. Beyond the problem of security, different electronic health records (EHRs) lack ease of communication. There are a plurality of different formats for documentation such as: Consolidated CDA (C-CDA), HL7’s Version 2.x (V2), HL7 Version 3 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA®), and still more (mutually exclusive) options for transfer: DICOM, Direct StandardTM, FHIR®, IHE. Blockchain technology may be the way forward.

A blockchain is a series of data entries that are ordered from first to last. Such chains of data are downloaded onto computers and are called nodes, because they all contain the whole of the data from the network. The whole process is secured with robust encryption methods. Certain varieties exist among blockchain protocols, but this is the general idea.

With its decentralized and encrypted nature, Blockchain technology would not be prone to the same issues as EHRs today. The decentralized side of the tech would enable it to be accessed immediately once a personalized key is provided, and entirely inaccessible before the personalized key. Such information could not possibly be held for ransom, because it resides in no computer in particular, but on a possibly worldwide node network. However, there are many competing blockchain technologies nowadays, and they can not all be the favorite child lest the hazard of interpretability issues recur in what was supposed to cure the problem.

Ethereum, a blockchain technology protocol invented by Vitalik Buterin, would seem to be the most plausible blockchain network for such an advancement due to its widespread adoption, and its facility for special use cases through smart contracts. A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control, or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement.

You can read more about blockchain technology here.