Ethereum, Blockchains and Saving Lives
Electronic Health Records are due for an upgrade.
When talking about Ethereum, blockchains, Web3, and so on, there’s a lot of focus on the impacts that decentralized finance (DeFi) will have on banking, on what cryptocurrencies mean for securities and taxes, or how a DAO compares to corporations, or what impact L2’s will have on popular chains. While these are all valid and crucial considerations regarding the future of Web3, there’s one application for blockchains that doesn’t get enough attention; the use of the blockchain for electronic health records (EHR). It could change everything.
In an article published by the NIH’s (National Institute of Health) Centre for Biotechnology Information, while EHRs are widely used because they’re efficient, secure, and reduce data redundancy, they’re still rife with poor interoperability and unresolved privacy issues. But by moving towards a distributed ledger protocol, the shortcomings of EHRs can be potentially solved. Regardless of who the record belongs to, and where they are in the world, their records will be available and up to date.
While it sounds like a theoretical and an academic exercise, there is actually a case where the Ethereum blockchain came to save the day, so to speak, resulting in a real-world favorable outcome. Take a look at this Twitter thread, while reviewing why the blockchain is the final frontier of revolutionizing patient records:
The author goes on to share the paper he was reading, which was oriented around using AI to gain more information from cancer microscopy images for better diagnosis and treatment. While that’s already fascinating on its own, he discovered that Ethereum played a role as well.
Ethereum saved the day. The benefits of utilizing the blockchain are obvious:
Data Integrity and Security: Blockchain's immutable nature ensures that once data is entered into the blockchain, it can't be altered or deleted, which is a crucial feature for maintaining data integrity in medical records. In addition, blockchain employs high-level encryption technologies which can help ensure the security of sensitive patient data.
Interoperability: Blockchain can facilitate a unified patient record, allowing any authorized provider to access a patient's complete medical history instead of isolated episodes of care. This can improve the coordination of care, and reduce errors and duplication of tests or treatments.
Patient Control Over Data: Blockchain could potentially enable a new model in which patients have more control over their own health records. Patients could decide who gets access to their data and could even potentially monetize their own health data.
Traceability: Blockchain can provide a complete, time-stamped history of a patient's health records, useful in certain contexts such as legal cases, insurance disputes, or research.
Despite these potential benefits, however, the NIH paper does highlight several significant challenges to using blockchain for patient records:
Privacy and Confidentiality: Health data is subject to stringent privacy regulations, such as HIPAA in the US. Blockchain's transparency is at odds with these requirements, although some potential solutions like private or permissioned blockchains or zero-knowledge proofs exist.
Scalability: The amount of data in healthcare is immense and continues to grow rapidly. At present, blockchain technology is still struggling with large volumes of data, without compromising decentralization/security which could limit its applicability to healthcare records. As well, there is the huge carbon footprint of the computational needs to consider.
Data Standards: For blockchain to work effectively, there needs to be consensus about what data is recorded and how it is formatted. However, medical data is complex and varied, and there's often a lack of standardization, especially across borders.
Legal and Regulatory Challenges: The use of blockchain for health records would likely face significant legal and regulatory hurdles, which could take time to overcome.
Adoption and Change Management: Changing the way health records are managed would likely be a massive undertaking requiring significant resources and potentially facing resistance from various stakeholders and health providers, who could potentially distrust the use of blockchain technology.
This final TLDR tweet says it all, however. The issues against aren’t insurmountable, and the spirit behind Ethereum, and blockchain in general, is of collaboration and ownership. It’s time we take our own health into our hands.