Blockchain manages medical big data and reduces industry risks

Blockchain and healthcare

Blockchain is essentially an organizational structure that allows transactions to be verified and recorded under the agreement of all parties involved. Blockchain is very popular in Bitcoin transactions and it is also an authoritative ledger that records all transactions and events.

This is different from the way medical information is currently traded. While our current data systems keep the ledger in a centralized location, blockchain requires each participant (node) to maintain a copy of the record. Any changes are compared with all nodes before being passed. Therefore, blockchain has stronger security and less possibility of unauthorized changes.

What blockchain means for healthcare

The healthcare industry currently suffers from massive data quality issues — these issues can come from doctor or clinician errors, hacker attacks, or the failure of the same electronic health record (EHR) to be updated because it was edited at the same time. Regardless, medical records are far from being completely trusted. In addition, we are also plagued by the problem of multiple vendors holding different versions of the same patient record without checking with each other, putting patients at risk of side effects that may cause physical, mental and financial harm.

Blockchain technology helps correct all these problems because no single entity will be responsible for the data, but at the same time all parties are responsible for maintaining data security and integrity. This approach provides a single source of truth for healthcare, making the system no longer subject to human error or manual data reconciliation.

This is similar to the approach taken by some information exchanges, but the key difference is verification. The information exchange is still solely responsible for the quality of the patient record, and patients and providers can only choose to trust the records presented to them.

However, advancing a blockchain solution is not an easy task, in large part because no one is sure how to apply blockchain to the healthcare industry or how to get around regulations such as HIPAA. However, some companies, such as Gem, Factom and GuardTime, are bringing blockchain infrastructure to the healthcare industry. Gem is working with Philips Healthcare to create the Philips Blockchain Lab, which is dedicated to finding answers to many questions surrounding the concept of blockchain technology in the healthcare industry.