Tag: digital health

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Blockchain Healthcare Providers Patients

Blockchain: Reimagining the Future of Health Data

It’s time for us to reimagine the future of healthcare information technology. More specifically, it’s time for us to rethink the management of personal health information, i.e. data from electronic health records (EHRs) and wearable devices. Data will continue to drive the technology that is becoming increasingly intertwined in our everyday lives and this remains especially true for healthcare.

From internet-enabled medical devices to fitness trackers, developments in digital health are creating new opportunities for comprehensive patient care and raising new questions about the ethical management of healthcare data. At Patientory, we believe the correct application of blockchain technology will allow us to effectively take advantage of these opportunities and provide answers to some of these questions.

Challenges for Comprehensive Care

Despite the advent of EHRs, medical records still suffer from a lack of interoperability. IT systems are often siloed and unique to the provider, which means a large amount of time and resources are spent simply requesting, sending, and compiling health information. This makes it challenging to create a comprehensive picture of an individual’s health across multiple providers, especially when there are variations in insurance coverage and geographic location over time.

Additionally, we are starting to see an increase in clinicians relying on patient-generated health data in conjunction with clinical data. This type of information includes health histories, symptoms, lifestyle choices, biometrics, etc., and can better inform care decisions because it provides valuable insight into an individual’s overall health and well-being in between medical visits. While patient portals and EHRs allow for a small portion of this data to be compiled, today’s technologies could be leveraged more effectively to improve health outcomes.

Challenges for Healthcare Data Management

In addition to being siloed, legacy healthcare IT systems are often aging and lacking in robust cybersecurity measures. Hospitals are particularly appealing targets for cyberattacks because their daily operations rely heavily on up-to-date information from electronic medical records,  and stolen health information is worth ten times more than a credit card number on the black market. And the more an EHR is fragmented across multiple providers, the higher the patient’s risk of personal data being exposed to people with malicious intent.

Since all of a provider’s EHRs are stored in one place, a successful breach will give a hacker access to all of that information at once. What’s especially troubling about this is that individuals have little control over the storage of their own personal health data and can do little to prevent this. There is an overall lack of patient control when it comes to the access and use of their own medical data, and this reflects broader societal questions about data management. Legislation, including HIPAA, simply has not caught up to the growing role of data in our lives.

Blockchain as a Solution

When applied to EHRs, blockchain can potentially address these issues. A blockchain consists of encrypted blocks of data that are immutable and linked together chronologically in a chain. In a healthcare setting, these blocks of data could be doctor’s appointments, surgical procedures, x-ray images, prescriptions, blood test results, patient-generated health data, etc. Copies of the blockchain would be distributed across a specified network of users and any additions to the chain would be updated for all users in real-time. Individuals would be in charge of sharing the decryption key for their own associated blocks of data with their chosen healthcare provider(s).

With a distributed application like Patientory’s, individuals would have access to a comprehensive picture of their health that includes compiled data from EHRs and wearable devices. Breaking the silos of traditional medical record storage would not only make the process of sharing EHRs significantly easier, but also result in more robust security. By integrating with PTOYNet distributed and decentralized blockchain network our application is able to adhere to both HIPAA and robust security standards.

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Patients

Returning the Control of Health Data to the Consumer

The vast amount of data available in today’s technology-driven and hyper-connected society is astounding. We create data everywhere we go with our smartphones, tablets, and laptops, and the increasing prevalence of the Internet of Things means that even more of the devices we interact with on a daily basis are gathering and sharing information. The application of this information through the creation and interpretation of large data sets, i.e. big data, is becoming an increasingly valuable economic force. Organizations in both the public and the private sectors are leveraging big data across industries, including healthcare, to develop more effective practices, inspire innovative breakthroughs, and better serve consumer needs.

The growing role of data in our lives and the data trading markets that have arisen raise important questions about data access and ownership. Who rightfully owns data, the individual creating it or the organization collecting it? Who has the right to access all of this information and what are they allowed to do with it? Who ultimately has more control when it comes to data use, the individual or the organization? Unfortunately, there is not a clear answer to these questions because in many cases our laws simply have not caught up yet. When it comes to electronic health records in the United States, providers are technically the owners (in every state except New Hampshire) since the data is recorded and stored on their IT systems.

One example of new data-related legislation, which came into effect just this year, is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), enacted by the European Union. The goal of the law is to ensure better data protection and privacy for all individuals by enhancing their rights when it comes to the handling of their personal information. The new rules require organizations to ensure that consumers explicitly consent to data collection and clearly understand the type of information being collected. Individuals in the EU now have the right to access their personal data, to request corrections to inaccurate data, and to restrict the use of their data. Although the full impact of the GDPR remains to be seen, it is a step in the right direction towards consumer empowerment when it comes to data.

There is no doubt that big data will continue to shape the future of healthcare. It is being used to predict epidemics, cure diseases, provide better preventative care, and lower costs, among other positive things. However, individuals have a surprising lack of control when it comes to their own health information. They are often asked to sign away health data ownership via blanket consent forms at times when they are scared or vulnerable, such as before surgery. Consumer rights need to be evolving alongside the use of data in healthcare. Patientory believes individuals should be able to easily access their own comprehensive health data and manage the use of it on their own terms. This is why we developed our distributed application. You can learn more about our solution to healthcare data access and control here.

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Public Health

Lessons in Health Data Management from the General Data Protection Regulation

This year, in the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. The GDPR is groundbreaking legislation for consumer rights when it comes to data protection. We all create data everywhere we go with our internet-enabled devices, but the use of that data is still largely unregulated. The GDPR was enacted to ensure that organizations comply with the following actions:

  • Fully inform consumers about the type of data being collected
  • Obtain explicit consent from consumers to gather their data
  • Allow consumers to access their data and request corrections
  • Give consumers the option to withdraw their consent at any time

When it comes to gathering and using health data specifically, Patientory believes these actions are vital to maintaining trust between patients and providers. Today’s electronic medical records struggle with issues of interoperability and cybersecurity, and we need to reimagine the future of health information management. This is why we developed our distributed application: to empower individual consumers to easily manage and control access to their own health data. Join us.

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Blockchain Patients

The Dark Side of Medical Data Trading

Longitudinal data, i.e. data collected from an individual at multiple points in time, can be very useful to medical researchers and provide valuable insights into health and illness. A famous example is the Framingham Heart Study, which was initiated in 1948 and continues on today. Researchers have followed three generations of participants, collecting and analyzing data to successfully identify the common characteristics and risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease. This type of health data use is common in clinical research and epidemiology, where aggregated data can reveal important information that leads to improved patient care and public health practices. However, health researchers motivated by advancing medical science are not the only ones interested in longitudinal data collection. Commercial companies motivated by profit are interested too.

There is a multi-billion dollar industry that exists around the buying and selling of medical data. Despite the fact that this is a common practice, many people are unaware of it. Data brokers pool data from hundreds of millions of pharmacy prescriptions, medical records, insurance claims, etc., and then slice and dice the information to sell to interested parties. This is technically allowed under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) because the data is intended to be anonymous. The medical information is not tied directly to a name, social security number, or detailed address. However, data brokers still add unique numbers to the data they collect, which allows them to build detailed patient dossiers by linking different pieces of information to the same individual. And with today’s advances in data mining technology and the vast amount of data available, the re-identification of anonymized data has only gotten easier.

Overall consumers have a troubling lack of control when it comes to their own medical data. We’d like to think the information we share with our healthcare providers remains private but this is not the case. In fact, the legal right of commercial companies to collect and sell health information without the explicit permission of the patient has been upheld by the Supreme Court. In the 1990s, the dominant player in the medical data trading industry began selling data to pharmaceutical companies on what individual physicians were prescribing to patients. These drug companies would then use the information to better tailor and target marketing and sales efforts. Once people caught on and started to complain about the invasion of privacy for profit, a few states passed legislation to limit the trade of prescriber-identifiable information. The major data broker then took them to court and won on corporate “free speech” grounds.

So why are the rights of data brokers to sell data privileged over the rights of patients to manage their own health information? Patientory does not have an answer to this question but we do believe in the power of blockchain to shift this paradigm. Distributed ledger technology has the ability to democratize data access by securing and validating data through a network rather than a single database. In addition to addressing cybersecurity and interoperability issues, blockchain technology can place the control of medical data sharing into the hands of individual patients through an app like Patientory’s. We believe consumers have a right to access their own health information and limit or permit the use of it as they see fit.

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Blockchain Healthcare Providers Patients

The Accenture Digital Health Technology Vision 2018: Trust and Responsibility

As technology becomes more deeply embedded in our lives, healthcare organizations are increasingly applying new technologies and innovations to deliver personalized, efficient, and informed care. The Accenture Digital Health Technology Vision 2018 emphasizes the need for healthcare providers to prioritize trust and responsibility in order for people to receive the full benefits of digitally enabled healthcare services.

The report explores five specific trends: Extended Reality, Frictionless Business, Internet of Thinking, Citizen AI, and Data Veracity. The first three are considered the enablers of an intelligent healthcare enterprise while the latter two are considered the consequences. Blockchain is primarily considered a part of the Frictionless Business trend. Ninety-one percent of health executives believe blockchain and smart contracts will be critical for their organization over the next three years. Read more about Patientory’s application of blockchain to healthcare here.