In a Harvard Business Review op-ed, three researchers discuss how blockchain can help physicians securely share patient medical records.
Blockchain is a "decentralized record management system," according to the three writers, John D. Halamka, MD, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston; Andrew Lippman, PhD, a senior research scientist at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass.; and Ariel Ekblaw, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab.
This decentralization allows a patient's medical data to be stored in a community-wide shared ledger, which includes an "audit trail" for accountability. It is also controlled by the patient, rather than the provider, contrasting traditional models of interoperability for medical data.
"Traditionally, the interoperability of medical data among institutions has followed three models," according to the writers. These models are "push" (in which medical data is sent from one provider to another), "pull" (in which one provider queries medical data from another) and "view" (in which one provider can look at medical data from another provider's record).
"Blockchain for healthcare is very early in its life cycle ," the writers conclude. "But it has the potential to standardize secure data exchange in a less burdensome way than previous approaches."
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