The magic bullet for healthcare records
My dream, brought to you by blockchain
We’ve all dealt with the paperwork needed from one doctor to another. We’ve all seen the doctor take notes as to their treatment and diagnosis. But do we ever get access to it? And what happens when you don’t have just one doctor, do you make them talk? Unless you’re a pro athlete or important government official the answer is usually no, and it’s usually because it’s difficult to get that information or get your doctors connected.
What if it wasn’t? What if you were able to make it easy for you and any medical provider?
We are very close to a better healthcare future, all brought to us by blockchain. So breifly suspend your disbelief and read with me for a moment while I dream up a better way to navigate through the healthcare system. In my last post I talked about the advantages machine learning can bring to healthcare, and in this post I’m going to address an issue that I didn’t spend much time on- security.
I’m going to preface this by saying that this thought experiment is made possible by the emerging technology blockchain. Blockchain is the underlying tech that enables bitcoin, and for the sake of brevity I’m going to expect you know a base amount about it. If you don’t, I have a handy video for you to brush up on how it works.
Let’s set the scene for our dream.
One day while your way to work, while you’re bending over to pick up your backpack, you feel a weird sensation. Not thinking much of it, choosing rather to focus on the fact that you’re running late and want to catch the next train, you move quickly out the door.
A few hours go by and you start to feel some pain in your back. Fast forward a week, you’re still having some pain so you decide to go see a doctor. It’s been a while since you’ve been to the doctor, so you have to see a new primary care doctor.
You do some searching and find someone that you want to see. After scheduling a time to see the doctor, you’re prompted to authorize the doctor to view your medical records, storied on a blockchain. Enter in your unique medical ID number, answer a security question, password, and lastly, authorize the doctor.
Just like that, the doctor has access to all of your medical information before you even walk in the door. Not just the easy stuff, like your name or date of birth, but chronic illnesses, allergies and even that shoulder surgery you had a few years back caused by a particularly rough match of beach volleyball. They now even have access to your insurance information too, leaving coverage and cost of treatment transparent for both you and your new doctor (not to mention a record of your visit that would cut down on fraud and make claims more efficient).
Going to see your doctor is simple, you walk in and verify you are who made the appointment. You wait in the coziest waiting room you’ve ever been in, complete with a barista and cucumber water (you are, after all, in my dream).
The doctor is lovely and very thorough. The doctor recommends an x-ray and a spine specialist, while encouraging you to grab a matcha late on your way out. You schedule your x-ray and spine specialist online after the visit, following the same authorization process as the primary care. Just like that your next provider has all the information they need. Better yet, your two new doctors would have access to the x-ray right when it was completed¹.
Skipping ahead a few months and you just finished physical therapy. You’re feeling great. Turns out the problem was brought on by a lingering muscle issue from a previous injury. When you login to the app that manages your health record, you get a notification asking you to confirm your providers.
The app lists the physical therapist you’ve been seeing, primary care doctor, hospital where you got your x-ray and spine specialists. It asks you if you would like to maintain access to all providers. Remembering your follow-up appointment in a few months, you don’t touch your primary care or spine specialists, but you decide to remove authorization for the hospital and physical therapist.
This is one aspect of the future according to blockchain. Healthcare today doesn’t involve seeing the same doctor every few months for everything, and a few tests at the same building. It’s a fragmented experience where you shuffle around from waiting room to waiting room, filling out paperwork and repeating the same few sentences about why you’re there. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Blockchain offers a very unique solution to help augment this shuffle. The fundamental concept of the technology is that the database isn’t stored in one central location, but every Node (or computer) that’s on the network. Security in a system like this is very strong, because if you wanted to tamper with the chain you’d need to hack every Node on the network (something I explain in a video here).
Healthcare information is rightfully paranoid about security, which is an added plus for the technology. But the other part of the architecture in blockchain, is how it builds in a chain. If you authorize a provider to access your chain, what that means is you’re pointing the provider to your medical records on the chain, lighting up your transactions on the system.
Every time you see a provider, it runs through the blockchain verification process, you are who you say you are, the provider is who they say they are, and the rest of the network confirms. That creates a transaction with the timestamp and a pointer to the data from the visit (diagnosis, notes, prescriptions, etc.).
This would mean that each stop at a provider in that shuffle, you’d be creating a digital paper trail. But it’s better than that. You want to see the notes from the doctor? Go ahead. You don’t have to worry about calling your last doctor to fax over records anymore. Want to see what the cancelation policy is at your doctor? You can look up the document from your chain. It’s all there.
The world I’m dreaming up is possible- and that’s not even the half of it. Liberating all of your patient data to you, could mean spotting an illness, suggesting a specific provider for you or save you from a 6 looking like an 8 that causes you a weeks worth of phone calls.
Dream with me and let’s build the future!
If you liked this post please leave me a comment or a few claps! If you have any questions, or are looking to build with blockchain, you can find me over at LinkedIn, or at our website 3ct.co.
- This is possible because the record of the x-ray would be stored to your blockchain, of which your providers have access to. It’s important to note that the x-ray image itself would likely not be stored on the blockchain, but rather a link or note to where it’s stored. Blockchain works well at storing transactions, which are small amounts of information in text, it doesn’t work well with larger files like images or videos.
