Blockchain at the Doctor’s Office?
There are about 7.53 billion people on the planet we call Earth.
7,530,000,000 people.
If each person the planet had their own health record, that is about 7.53 billion files. The issue is where do we keep all these files?
Where can we store some of the most important data in the world so that it is easily accessible but also secure?
The blockchain is where!
Health Record Accessibility
The healthcare industry has been rapidly changing and incorporating new technology in many aspects, but one aspect often overlooked is the aspect of patient data. Patient data is almost, if not, as important as the care you get in healthcare systems, but the problem is people don’t often have access to it.
Wait, what? Patients don’t have access to their health records? People don’t have access to their data about past and current treatments or even conditions? The answer is no.
Getting health records from a doctor or hospital is extremely difficult, but what is even more concerning is that data when sent from one healthcare professional to another often is mismatched. As Shaun Grannis as the Director of Centre for Biomedical Informatics explained, “As many as half of the patient records are mismatched when data is transferred between healthcare systems.” A lot of hospitals are reluctant to release patient data and that’s because they don’t want patients to go to another hospital and lose a customer. This practice is known as information blocking.
So it’s safe to say health record accessibility is nowhere near where it should be, but what if we used blockchain to create a long-lasting and reliable platform?
Why Blockchain?
Putting health records up on the blockchain allows for a few things:
- Records are on the blockchain, not hospitals or doctors
- Blockchain is easy to access and secure
Using a private blockchain platform, the health records are all on that platform and don’t belong to any one hospital or doctor. Each patient would be identified by their Hash ID and they would have some say to who gets their health record and who doesn’t.
In addition to that, using a blockchain platform makes health records less prone to any type of outside tampering. Since the data in a block is immutable and the way in which the blockchain works, it’s extremely hard to alter data in a block without it being noticed.
It would make health records more easily accessible to patients, providing more transparency when it comes to their health and well-being.
So perhaps next time you walk into your doctor's office, they won’t be pulling out a paper copy of our health records but rather they’ll be accessing it through a blockchain system online after you’ve shared your ID with them!