Recently there has been an incredible amount of excitement about applying blockchain technology to healthcare. This weekend I attempted to try and move beyond the hype and find a tangible application of blockchain in healthcare that I could fully understand. Despite many hours of research, I am disappointed to report that most of what is out there is hype or in development - there are very few (if any) actual applications.
In addition to lack of real world applications, many of the blockchain healthcare projects require significant changes to the core blockchain technology used in bitcoin. This is concerning because blockchain is still quite new and the best example we have of it working is bitcoin itself. Bitcoin is quite delicate and the developers of bitcoin are extremely cautious with any changes to it. Applying the core blockchain technology to healthcare will of course require changes but such changes are very risk and should be done with caution or we risk losing the key benefits that are promised.
Given this, I thought it would be useful to understand bitcoin's use of blockchain before trying to find opportunities for applications in healthcare. This way we can filter applications in healthcare against the features bitcoin already provides so we can transfer our confidence in bitcoin to our healthcare application of blockchain.
Benefits
* Immutability - Once data is stored on the blockchain you can be confident that it will never be changed. This is possible because blockchain is essentially an append only transaction log which resides on many machines.
* Durability - Once data is stored on the blockchain, it will never be lost. This is accomplished by duplicating data across many machines - traditional backup/restore mechanisms are neither applicable or needed.
* Reliability - Once data is stored on the blockchain, it can be retrieved at any point in the future. This is possible because the data is stored on many machines and data access requires access to just one of the machines.
* Transparency - Once data is stored on the blockchain, it is visible to everyone. This is possible because blockchain does not implement any form of authentication or authorization to access the data.
* Anonymous - Anyone can put data on the blockchain. This is possible because blockchain does not implement any form of authentication or authorization
* Integrity - Blockchain transactions are validated against a defined protocol. This protocol can include logic such as ensuring validity of the actors involved in the transaction via public key cryptography and validation of the data in the transaction.
What opportunities are there in healthcare for applying these blockchain benefits? The first thing that comes to mind is integrity of healthcare records which I will describe in a subsequent blog post.
Blockchain is still quite new to me so feel free to leave a comment if I got something wrong. Questions are always welcome as well!
