Estonia announces launch of blockchain-based medical health record security project

Rage Comment : Estonia has always been far ahead of other countries in terms of blockchain investment and application. Although it is only a small country in the Baltic Sea, it has long started to cooperate with BitNation to apply blockchain technology to residents' identity verification. And just at the beginning of this year, Nasdaq's exchange in Estonia has begun to use blockchain for shareholder voting. And this time, the application of blockchain has been extended to the custody of electronic health records. For a long time, the medical and health field has been considered to be the second largest application field of blockchain besides finance.

Translation: Annie Xu

Data security startup Guardtime has announced a partnership with the Estonia eHealth Foundation to use blockchain technology to secure 1 million patient medical records.

The fund has since integrated Guardtime’s keyless signature infrastructure (KSI) blockchain technology with the Foundation’s Oracle data engine to enable real-time viewing of patient records.

This e-government system established in Estonia in 1997 has attracted people's attention. It is implemented by embedding a chip in the ID card, and then the citizens of the country can use more than 100 e-government services, such as tax declaration and voting. The whole service process is instant and only requires logging into a website.

Estonia's e-government system includes electronic patient records. The purpose of integrating Guardtime's technology is to protect this data with an "independent, forensic-quality audit trail." The company says the technology makes data tampering impossible.

A Guardtime representative told reporters:

Due to the existence of hackers, malware, system problems, etc., the security risks in sensitive data protection include information tampering, deletion, and incorrect upgrades. Blockchain technology can ensure the authenticity and integrity of data and fully record the data change process.

Margus Auv??rt, director of the eHealth Foundation, said Guardtime's technology can protect health records in real time.

“It will allow us to respond to any incidents before large-scale damage occurs.”

Blockchain technology changes

Guardtime was founded in 2011, when it claimed to provide "keyless signatures" to protect data validity. Company members reportedly contributed to the Estonian government's digital signature law and ID cards in 1990.

Guardtime has been engaged in research in the field of encryption for a long time. It claims that the company's KSI blockchain was already in operation as early as April 2008, before the emergence of Bitcoin.

A company spokesperson said:

The idea of ​​Bitcoin is based on existing technology, and it has many similarities with our blockchain. I can say that Bitcoin is a ledger and a blockchain; Hyperledger and Ripple are ledgers without blockchains; KSI is a blockchain without a ledger.

The Guardtime system categorizes and signs data using technology similar to that of blockchain startup Factom. Whenever a document changes, a new signature is automatically generated and stored on the company’s blockchain.

"So the data is not stored, but a series of hashes of the actual document updates."

"The company's system provides real-time early warning by signing key digital assets that protect digital infrastructure. For example, signing application components, log files, and firmware can provide early warning of hacker or malware attacks. In this way, any organization can confirm and deal with network vulnerabilities in real time."

Unlike Bitcoin, which relies on asymmetric key cryptography, KSI uses only hash functions.