The fallacy of "Medical Records on Blockchain" vs. Data Integrity (My perspectiv

[SynapseNode]

Hello everyone,

I am new to the forum, but I wanted to share a perspective from my field of expertise. I work with Health Data Interoperability (specifically with the HL7 FHIR standard) and I am currently researching Digital Health.

I often see new crypto projects promising to "store patient records on the blockchain". From a technical and architectural standpoint, this is often a mistake that leads to failure. Medical data is incredibly heavy (imaging, history logs) and privacy regulations (like GDPR) make immutable storage of sensitive personal data risky.

The real "killer app" for Blockchain in healthcare, in my view, isn't storage, but Integrity.

The most viable model I am researching involves:

Keeping the actual data in traditional off-chain servers (using FHIR resources for standardization).

Generating a cryptographic Hash of that data.

Anchoring only the Hash on the Bitcoin blockchain.

This guarantees that the medical history hasn't been tampered with, without bloating the chain or exposing patient data.

I would love to hear if anyone knows of active projects that are focusing strictly on this "Integrity/Timestamping" layer instead of trying to be a full storage solution.

Best regards!

[NotFuzzyWarm]

You need to research usage of blockchains outside of the crypto coins world...
They are widely used for logistics, food production, manufacturing and forensic records storage - anywhere secured immutable data is required. They are private blockchains having nothing to do with crypto ones. Doing a search using "IBM blockchain" or "Intel blockchain" should get you pointed in the right directions.

[VicenteVicenteMontague]

Good point on integrity over raw storage, that’s where blockchain actually makes sense in healthcare. Private chains like IBM’s work for controlled environments, but anchoring hashes to a public chain like Bitcoin adds a stronger trust and immutability guarantee without relying on a single vendor. Using FHIR off-chain plus on-chain timestamping feels like a much cleaner architecture than trying to shove sensitive data directly onto a ledger.