Healthcare: Blockchain may be the only secure way to store data

Comment: Some people believe that the healthcare sector is likely to be the second largest application scenario for blockchain technology after the financial sector. For a long time, the centralized storage of health data has easily led to large-scale data leakage. With the popularization of fingerprint data applications and genetic data detection methods, more and more people are worried that once a leakage occurs, it will lead to catastrophic consequences. Blockchain may be the best data storage solution that humans can find at present, due to its high redundancy, non-tamperability, low cost and ability to manage multi-signature complex permissions.

The disruptive nature of blockchain technology makes it easy to imagine how it can be put into practice in the financial sector. Just as emails can be delivered in seconds, if the traditional T+3 transaction process can be shortened to a few minutes instead of the traditional days, it will inevitably increase revenue significantly. As the earliest field of blockchain practice, finance will be a perfect scenario for blockchain use.

However, some new application scenarios are gradually emerging, and the healthcare field is one such scenario. Some industry insiders believe that the use of blockchain technology will be able to optimize processes and improve efficiency.

Considering all the sensitive information related to health: identity characteristics, disease conditions, treatment plans, and payment situations, a person's health status may be the most private information about that person. But in the past, often time and again, this related information has been leaked on a large scale, resulting in personal health data being circulated on the Internet.

Here are two examples of large-scale data breaches:

Anthem: 80 million patient and employee records

UCLA Health: 4.5 million patients

In these data breaches, it is often due to network operation problems that expose all data to hackers. A single point of failure can result in everyone's information being compromised.

Blockchain technology can prevent this from happening through multi-signature private keys and encryption technology. When the data is hashed and placed on the blockchain, multi-signature technology can be used to allow only authorized people to access the data. Using this technology, it will be possible to formulate certain rules to access the data, and authorization must be obtained before it can be carried out, whether it is a doctor, a nurse or the patient himself; perhaps, in some cases, it can be set that authorization is required from 2 out of 3 people.

Blockchain company GEM, which has received $7 million in funding to expand its enterprise platform, has been working with different stakeholders in the health industry to evaluate whether blockchain technology is needed. Micah Winkelspecht, CEO of GEM, said that similar to the financial industry, when designing a blockchain application, multiple stakeholders in the healthcare industry need to be considered. He said that if each independent stakeholder can be linked to a cohesive, shared read-write database, real blockchain innovation will occur.

Winelspecht

“Being able to have insurance companies, hospital billing departments, lenders, and patients all use a single blockchain to manage payments could massively reduce redundancy across the industry.”

He went on to explain that the blockchain network is not just used to solve the problem of medical and health data storage, and payment will be another development direction.

“If blockchain can be used throughout the entire process of managing medical payments, it will also be able to manage the entire process of patient medical records. Blockchain allows multiple other organizations to access the network without having to worry about data security and integrity. Medical records can be created and shared by multiple parties, and can be supplemented and updated by multiple parties, which will reshape the efficiency and transparency of the entire industry.”

Gem's platform uses multi-signature technology, hardware security modules (HSM), and encrypted key chains to solve identity and information access security, and will become an application layer of the blockchain protocol. A blockchain can permanently record and save network activities, and users are authorized within this identity authentication framework.

In this case, index or append records

Factom and HealthNautica are looking for a secure medical record and audit trail solution. They encrypt the data and write it to the Bitcoin blockchain, and use timestamps to ensure data accuracy. These records cannot be tampered with because they are written to the blockchain and cannot be read without permission. HealthNautica hopes to improve the efficiency of the compensation process and the certainty that the records cannot be changed.

Tierion is another blockchain startup that has built a data storage and verification platform using blockchain records. The company announced its first project with Philips Healthcare in 2015. Although details of the project have not been made public, Aron Laeven, Philips’ global innovation IT director, told reporters:

“We are exploring the use of blockchain technology in healthcare just as we explore other new technologies.”

The most exciting reason for combining blockchain and healthcare is that this is a completely new field. As enterprises and medical institutions see the impact of blockchain technology on the financial field, they will gradually promote and implement this technology in the healthcare field, hoping to obtain financial-level security and efficiency.