Calling Boston Area Developers - MIT Hacking Medicine is Coming Up.

[mikenewhouse]

This year's hacking medicine event at MIT is April 24-26  http://hackingmedicine.mit.edu/grandhack/

It is a great event. Free food. Prizes. Smart and interesting people, and a very fun way to spend a weekend.

You can sign up on their page or just show up. They are not stringent on denying admissions.

This is a great opportunity to develop a product/proof of concept for a bitcoin application in the healthcare space.

I will personally be pitching an idea that I hope to get a team working on for the competition/weekend around leveraging the blockchain for the purpose of physician credentialing. I think this is a great use case that can bring immediate value to stakeholders while also providing greater functionality than the conventional methods of credentialing. If anyone is interested I can discuss this topic at length.

I hope to see many of you there. Healthcare is ripe for innovation and disruption.

PLEASE JOIN ME! QUESTIONS?   

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[lucasjkr]

How does the block chain improve on the physician credentialing system we now have?

Patient wise, I was thinking that perhaps there might be an application for storing records, like treatments, medications and the like, you know as an unalterable record, but HIPPA ...

[mikenewhouse]

How does the block chain improve on the physician credentialing system we now have?

Patient wise, I was thinking that perhaps there might be an application for storing records, like treatments, medications and the like, you know as an unalterable record, but HIPPA ...

The credentialing system we now have is very manual. It is very intensive for hospitals to go through the credentialing process for their physicians. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/ee/ac/47/eeac47bfc4824a27a4ce66c188a7e8d6.jpg Authenticating credentialing against the blockchain will make it so much easier.

As for your HIPAA comment. I am in agreement in the huge benefit that can be had. I am in disagreement on whether HIPAA comes into play. Effectively such a system leveraging bitcoin would transfer ownership (in the form of a private key) from the providers to the patients. HIPAA goes out the window, opening a pandora's box of applications that can now view, access, and add patient information.

[lucasjkr]

I think hippa is a BIG concern, and I don't think that a system tracking treatments for multiple patients should be accessible (writable) by patients. I also don't know if it's appropriate to track all that sort of stuff on bitcoins blockchain, both from privacy and for the health of Bitcoin itself; why not devise "medchain", a block chain built from the ground up for storing an unalterable record of patient treatments, rather than build it into or off of the main block chain?

[Blackbird0]

Just throwing this out there ... the volume of patient medical records is ... staggering. Building that into the block chain would be increasing its size manyfold I imagine. Given the huge variety of different EMRs out there, there'd be a significant interoperability problem, as well as issues involved with translating multimedia records into the blockchain.

[lucasjkr]

Just throwing this out there ... the volume of patient medical records is ... staggering. Building that into the block chain would be increasing its size manyfold I imagine. Given the huge variety of different EMRs out there, there'd be a significant interoperability problem, as well as issues involved with translating multimedia records into the blockchain.

That's specifically why I suggested that this should be separate from the Blockchain... a medchain instead;

it won't have the hashing power of the bitcoin network behind it, but I suspect that that much power isn't necessary in a closed system (i.e., the general public won't/shouldn't be allowed access to a system like this in any meaningful way - you don't want hackers wiping things out, if they were able to 51% it, nor do you want patient information getting disclosed, etc).

Interoperability could also be an issue, but one could describe system and access requirements for participants - if a drs office wants to participate, store patient files (WITH patient approval), they could, but they would need to use the "approved" client software, most likely from approved locations.

Storing data is one thing.

Securing it with a block chain is another.

Access control - that's the biggie; you don't want unauthorized people to gain access to either the whole system or to individual records within the system. Encryption would need to be centric - if someone did get their hands on the medchain, you don't want them being able to decipher everyones details. Per users access would need to be grantable and revocable. And again, the sheer data requirements would be astronomical for each participating physician/hospital.... If everything was on one chain.

Next though - each client gets their own blockchain.

Lowers the data requirements.

But then the real question would be, how worried are we about peoples files or histories being altered after the fact? Is a blockchain even necessary, as opposed to journalling or revision control?

I think I got ahead of myself and should shut up.

sorry!

[mikenewhouse]

I am envisioning using the blockchain for authentication purposes only. Which to my understanding would involve putting hashed data into the blockchain- addressing the bloat issues.