Blockchain And Big Data: A Solution To Healthcare's Biggest Problem
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
Even as Big Data has ushered in excited conversations around a future shaped by population health and predictive analytics, the healthcare industry continues to struggle with challenges around interoperability, data silos, security, and other concerns. The answer to many of those, according to Health IT Analytics, might come from the world of Bitcoin.
Intro To Blockchain
Blockchain is essentially an organizational structure that allows transactions to be verified and recorded upon the agreement of all impacted parties. It is popular in Bitcoin transactions, and an authoritative ledger records all transactions and events.
This differs from the current way in which healthcare information is transacted, in that while our current data systems keep the ledger in a centralized location, blockchain would require each participant (node) to maintain a copy of the record. Any changes are compared against all notes before approval. The end result is stronger security and a decreased chance of unauthorized changes.
What Blockchain Means For Healthcare
Healthcare currently suffers from a massive data quality problem — this may come from physician or clinician error, hackers, or issues of the same EHR not being properly updated because of simultaneous editing. Regardless, healthcare data is far from completely trustworthy. Beyond this, we struggle with the issue of multiple providers holding different versions of the same patient record, none of which are checked against each other, leaving patients subjects to an even greater chance of potential error and the physical, mental, and financial harm that can come along as side effects.
Blockchain helps to rectify all of this, because no one entity would be in charge of controlling the data, but at the same time, all parties would be responsible for maintaining security and integrity. This would present healthcare with a single source of truth that parties share — one that is no longer subject to human error or manual data reconciliation.
Much of this is similar to the initiatives some HIEs have taken on, but the key difference is validation. HIEs are still solely responsible for the quality of the patient record and both patients and providers are in a position where they must simply trust the records presented to them.
Moving forward with a blockchain solution is not easy though, in no small part because no one is sure how to apply it to healthcare or how it would bump up against regulations such as HIPAA. Some companies though, such as Gem, Factom, and GuardTime are bringing a blockchain infrastructure to the industry. Gem specifically is working with Philips Healthcare in the creation of the Philips Blockchain lab, which is dedicated to answer many of the questions around the concept.