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A well-designed blockchain doesn’t just cut out intermediaries; it reduces costs, increases speed, reach, transparency and traceability for many business processes.For example, the healthcare industry is obligated to safeguard personal information about your health. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires health professionals to protect your personal information, which is no easy task.

Blockchain’s secure technology offers an ideal way to create a shared network of healthcare data with near-perfect security. It is simply a superior way to store, share and protect sensitive data among everybody involved in keeping you healthy.

That’s right — blockchain can untangle your mess of electronic health records and, most important of all, give YOU control of your personal medical records and who gets to see it...
ARE THERE DISADVANTAGES IN BLOCKCHAIN? WHAT ARE THEY? PLEASE LET US KNOW..

Are there really demerits, if not for power failure, no or low network,illknowledge of how block chain works,government not being able to tax the crypto systems.

We have been told that whatever have Merit must correspondingly have demerit. Well blockchain has brought in many improvement in our ecosystem and has come to help perfect the way we work. But blockchain is very complex to understand. and it requires up-to-date technological knowledge, power availability is a must and a strong internet connections is paramount. 

1. Wrong. A blockchain is slow, inefficient and expensive to run.


2. What a true blockchain offers are mainly censorship resistance and decentralization. A healthcare database doesn't need both of them.


3. Go back to 1.

The benefits of blockchain, however, are more than big enough to sustain its relevance for generations to come. Without further ado, here are the most important benefits of blockchain that may prove to be useful to businesses like Supple Chain, Quality assurance, Accounting, Smart contracts and much more.

i don't know if you are copying this from somewhere that makes it out of context or what but you can not generalize this. "blockchain" is simply a chain of blocks. it can have that "intermediaries" that you are talking about and be centralized even or it can be decentralized and cut them out and be a distributed ledger among nodes.

this has always sounded like a cool idea but every time i think about it, that doesn't really sound like the best option compared to alternative form of having a database!

The Maltese Prime Minister also to support crypto and blockchain in the real world:

https://coincodex.com/article/2424/maltese-prime-minister-joseph-muscat-supports-crypto-and-blockchain-in-un-speech/

so far we have only seen the blockchain technology to be used to create a cryptocurrency and only a handful have been successful and they were successful because of the decentralization path that they chose. otherwise those coins that chose the centralization path such as XRP, ETH,... are doomed to fail.
additionally any other field that I have seen the blockchain technology to be used in have not been successful so far. the healthcare system included. so far I have seen ICOs that mention that and only raise money to take and go away. nothing else happened more than that.

I'd love to see you give an actual explanation or example of how the use of a blockchain in the medical industry is a superior way to story sensitive data.
When you talk about using blockchain to store personal medical data, do you mean a public blockchain or a private one?

How will you give access to the people who need access and how will you prevent unauthorized access?

Blcockchain is an innovation of the century. It can be applied and found to be immensely useful to all human endeavor. Blockchain technology will not only be useful in financial   space  but has been applied successfully in politics, healthcare management, real estate and logistics and procurement. In all these areas it has not been found wanting in any of these deployments. For me i have not yet seen  where there is any need to adjust blockchain operations though there is no perfect system there may be short comings but me iam yet see it.

There are many busyness logics hard corded in to the blockchain network. I really interest about smart contacts as an example for that is If I have a vehicle coming from Japan to Australia in the terms of the agreement when it lands in Australia I pay the company. Instead of paper works and sending money, you can have a smart contact like If received to the port then send money. Also I don't need to trust the vendor or any other person I just need to trust the blockchain network.

Apart from the medical health, I have also heard that some countries are looking at how they can benefit from it in conducting elections. I think that can really help in the codifying of data and election information.

Forgive me for expressing my disagreement, but I believe that we could also say that blockchain is fast. It depends on what we compare it with. The transactions are also relatively cheap and I am not sure what you mean when you say it's expensive to run (no need to make a PoW rather than PoS and ICO allows to gather money for initial development). In about 10 minutes the network receives the first confirmation of the transaction (which is usually when companies start processing your request, so we could say that this is the transaction speed) and the fee is $0.6. When I recently made a Swift transfer on 400 euros, the fee was about 15 euros (!) and it took two working days for the transfer to be received.

I think that an important disadvantage of blockchain is that as the network gets bigger, transaction fees and speed are inevitably becoming worth. That's why I think DAG is a very attractive technology, because it has the biggest issues during the initial stage with improvements as the network expands.

If the blockchain was so awesome,why it still isn't adopted by the healthcare insurance industry?
I guess that the blockchain technology is still overhyped.People(like the OP,who created this thread) continue to think that it's a cutting edge technology with no flaws.The real power of the blockchain will be revealed after 2020.

Seems OP is talking about a public blockchain since there's some product that used this for more accessible data and to avoid medical counterfeiting however I see this as a threat for our medical records since everyone can able to see it in which contradict to our traditional record keeping.

Let's not put everything to blockchain as some things are better off without this.

you are talking about usage of blockchain technology in other sectors and like your example says in healthcare! in this case usage of blockchain technology compared to the regular method of using a database as they all are doing now is considered expensive and slow in comparison. what you said is about fees when you use it as a currency and regarding that you are also considering decentralization when talking about fees. of course making it centralized will reduce the fees.

DAG is also not as secure and is not as mature as the blockchain. and it is not ready.

1. a blockchain doesnt need to be fast for very purpose. and can be made faster and more efficient without needing to step away from blockchains.
2. it can be efficient with the right devs that want to care about blockchain efficiency coding it instead of saying it cant be made efficient
3. a blockchain can be free to run.

i feel that your bias's against blockchains have become more apparent. and im starting to wonder why you post on a forum that uses blockchains as its main security model.

when you stop imagining a blockchain as a one dimensional strand. and instead view it 3 dimensionally

EG imagine a doctors surgery of 6000 patients has a chain of hashes. the personal data not being the chain. but being a UTXO database of encrypted data. and each new block of daily updated records is updating hashes. not clear text data.

each doctors surgury strand of chain. hass a block or UTXO header that gets added to a master chain. and so the network is not validating what the clear text says. but validating the hashes add up.
and its the doctors and patients in their smaller subchains that validate that personal stuff

it also helps so that its not one massive chain of a nations patient records. but subchains that regions/townships manage at sublevels.

Faster, cheaper, and more efficient than a centralized database?


Can you give us examples on "who" these "devs" are, and what blockchain project are they working on?


Having no cost at all? How.

Plus what would your definition of "blockchain" be?

ok, but the real question is WHY?!!!
it is not about how it is done it is about whether doing it that way is better than how we are currently doing things.

for example take the case of bitcoin versus the banks. I have a bank account and a debit card issued by the bank. whenever I want to purchase something I use that and there is no fees involved. it is fast and safe enough. so why would I need bitcoin? the answer is obvious (the decentralization, global,...) I won't get into that. but there is a valid answer to that "WHY" question which is why bitcoin exists and is strong.
but I can't say the same about using blockchain other fields such as a hospital and its patient information.

Because the term "Blockchain Technology" has become a marketing tool for "companies" to trick the community to buy their tokens from their ICOs, and venture capitalists to invest directly in their "start ups". Haha.

we are know that the blockchain system is ict inclined, you have to be a computer literate to  be able to make use of the blockchain technology, so that will be a demerit to blockchain as we know, not everyone is literate when it come to ict.

I think the merits of blockchain include its immutable, transparent and distributed nature atleat no single point of failure! I am concerned though, the fact that a transaction can't be recovered still makes non blockchain systems a million times better! Blockchains which provide you nothing like a private key will always have transactions stuck.

I think you are correct and I total agree with you... A true blockchain hovers largely around the breaking of censorship and a full decentralized system. A lot of blockchain in recent time has proven to be slow, expensive, and thereby very inefficient..

A huge improvement of the blockchain is really needed to finally make its merits worth it.

Could you explained to me the between this ERC20, DAG and Blockchain? This are some of the basic of cryptocurrency which one should know. I have some information on block chain but when it comes to DAG I do not have that much information. ERC20 also we know that it is a platform of ethereum network however there are many platforms for cryptocurrency claiming that their platform is good and fast like the NEO platform. However, is not all this I have come to research about the DAG could you simplify this to me? This may be off topic but I bet you have some expertise on this. And I would like to see your post reply so that others will know also.

imagine each doctors clinic/surgery have a little black memorystick that is plugged into a electric wall socket with a usb outlet
that memory stick. is the node. now realise each doctors clinic/surgery has one.

now the health care system can sack all the auditors and data security guys. and just get a janitor replace a memory stick if one develops a fault.

letting doctors be doctors and let more of the treasury funds be used for healthcare instead of administration
walk into any doctors clinic and ull see less non-medical staff shuffling papers.

less surgery/clinic managers fiddling with numbers so they can vacation 48 weeks a year at others expense
...
now with all that said there are many places where blockchains are useless, but when there is a scenario that data needs to be in more than one location and edit/append data to it from more than one location. then there can be some advantages.

the more wider field of multiple locations and multiple entities needing more than just viewing privileges. the more a blockchain can be seen as beneficial.

you dont need to be ICT literate

most cars are run by computers. theres no longer a physical steel shaft from the steering wheel of a car to the wheels. its now moved by separate motors controlled by computers.

yet an ICT illiterate person just sees wheels, doors, carseat and a steering wheel.
its for the ICT literate to make things simple for the illiterate

Hahaha. I take some, only that little some, of your opinions with respect because I know you are a technically inclined person, and someone to learn from. But that's slowly going away.


What a world that would be. ::)


They can do that today without a "blockchain". Why don't they?


The power of "Blockchain Technology". Amazing. ::)



That can be done securely using an SQL database.

Is the "blockchain" not an append-only ledger?

that doesn't exactly answer my question though. it only talks about how the blockchain technology is going to used in this particular case.
my question is basically why would you use it instead of regular methods. you mentioned less paperwork and less staff. ok, lets make it digital with a database and a server. but that doesn't still have to be a blockchain.