The technology holds the promise of making information more secure and more sharable while giving patients more control over it.
Wearable and mobile medical devices abound these days, thanks to the miniaturization of electronics, widespread high-capacity wireless communications and the growing infrastructure of the internet of things. Aside from smart watches that track activity and performance, which many people are familiar with, medical monitors keep tabs on patients’ conditions, therapies and medications. They offer data on how they are responding to treatment, signal when they could be at risk of developing complications, and track other factors.
But to produce a complete picture for the patients, the data produced by those monitors must connect with other systems down the line, and they might not interoperate with all of them. What’s more, mobile systems — like any other internet-connected system — also have security vulnerabilities that could be hacked, putting patient data at risk.
Blockchain has the potential to solve those problems, experts say. The technology takes a distributed, encrypted approach in which transactions are recorded into “blocks” that are permanently time-stamped. They cannot be changed, but can be added to. Each block can be accessed by devices on that blockchain network, where subsequent activity, in the form of other blocks, is added to the chain. This decentralization allows all parties to track and verify each transaction, and keeps everything more secure than if it were all kept in a central location.
In health care, a blockchain system would allow each doctor, technician or other medical professional a patient sees to add to the chain. The blockchain isn’t tied to any particular records system, so interoperability would not be a problem. The patient would have access to every record added to the chain. And the decentralized approach makes the information much more secure than if it were all piled into one system, where a single successful compromise could gain access to everyone’s information.