Applications on the Blockchain (Part 4)

Generally speaking, medical records are typically controlled under the regulations of patient care within hospitals. However, with the ever-progressing capabilities of applications taking over the needs and wants of users, one such application contributing to this particular subject at hand is BurstIQ. As healthcare organizations prioritize organizational strategies for the medical information of patients, this particular tool is helpful for those who prefer scalability in managing biomedical data within a digital world. It uses an encryption method through smart contracts that can be sorted through a built-in tool called lifegraph ™. This enables an average patient to stay in control of their own medical privacy, ensuring data security on behalf of health systems, caregivers, and other service providers.

Managing personal information, especially when provided by the person who used trusted services of their own, is not an easy feat especially in a centrally-based network. Hence, BurstIQ gives control back to the user when they’re exchanging medical patient information between services. You may be asking, “How is this information shared among professionals who aren’t just friends involved in a smart contract transaction?”. BurstIQ makes use of various features, with the main ones responsible for this functionality being BurstChain ™ and Consent Contracts. These features allow individuals to freely share their medical data anywhere around the globe throughout the global health marketplace. Since medical records transferred and passed by smart contracts count as assets, actively participating individuals who share their information with the health system under BurstIQ are given benefits. These benefits include driving academic research for doctors, keeping up consistent communication with caregivers, and helping businesses specifically promote and sell their own health products alongside other B2B corporations while upholding all of the core privacy rules that must be set in place.

If you’ve read the previous article to the third part in our series ‘Applications on The Blockchain’, at which we went over identity protection, especially for businesses who must manage customer data when selling a product online, you would have notice that quite some applications pass the corporations through credibility systems, at which BurstIQ strives to do something similar in the healthcare sector. Branching off from privacy controls, the predictability and management of data is key for businesses in healthcare, as a lot of the work does not necessarily become controlled for the work itself but the outcome that comes out of it. As analytics are the main tool used in making sure a certain level of security is set in place for healthcare agencies to be able to handle extensive and intricate health datasets, under once again the BurstChain feature implemented into BurstIQ, other prototypes have also been set in place to enable applications to be able to manage medical records in a decentralized basis, with the specific ones being HealthChain as well as BlockTrial. To avoid errors in mechanisms responsible for assessing data points in a system reliant on storage size and latency, HealthChain aims to provide the same features as BurstChain does in scalability, transparency, and security in the private management of patient data, by upholding compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), a policy set in place in 1996 as a federal law for protecting sensitive client information from being disclosed without the consent of the patient. We have discussed before policies such as this one that aligns and combines with decentralized networks, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a method for combatting against financial misconducts on either national or international levels, set by the G7 summit in 1989.

The BurstChain™ feature is compliant with the same law, although further developments to the HealthChain prototype are ongoing due to security risks set in place, such as the inability to control important aspects of healthcare activities such as managed service providers (MSPs) within complex adaptive systems (CAs). MSPs are largely responsible for assessing cost and workforce planning in CAs which may range anywhere not just from individual hospitals to ecosystems, something BurstChain excels at improving for relations between patients and caregivers and or businesses. BlockTrial compared to HealthChain is more focused on smart contracts, at which using the default system capabilities of the blockchain technology, uses the exchange method in managing excessive amounts of data generated by trials and their forthcoming results, by storing them in the form of transaction records instead of the clinical information, therefore saving time for latency and storage in the network. For a quick note, latency in blockchain networks is essentially the amount of time that takes place between the submission of a transaction and its follow-up confirmation by the network, a major element in ensuring that hackers do not evade the constant traffic taking place especially when IOTA formatted nodes are set in stone.

Compliance with HIPAA, ensuring smart contracts are set in place for confirmation of data, improving speed and efficiency in how latency is managed by the network especially in the hands of healthcare professionals, are all of the features that an application must require in order to manage sensitive personal information under a diligent and ethical fashion. Though, this does not mean that adopting such a procedure will completely protect against security hacks, as major yet common security intrusions that we’ve gone over in the workshop series ‘Cybersecurity & Vulnerabilities in Blockchain Technology: The Enebus Attack’, is always going to be prevalent especially when this data is generated and assessed at a greater level beyond the normal speed of which blockchain networks can typically help facilitate transactions (which is 7 transactions per second). By the use of examples, in the already existing hemisphere of healthcare technologies in the blockchain, security incidents have taken place threatening the wellbeing of patients, such as a 42% increase in hacking intrusions taking place between 2019 and 2020 due to a network breach for a Canadian medical testing company by the name of LifeLab. Responsible for taking your blood test to be later looked at by family practitioners, hackers with unauthorized access compromised 15 million patient records in 2019 and 40 million in 2020, an issue that gave awareness to ongoing security vulnerabilities in centralized networks that may not otherwise be breached at ease in verifiable smart contract transactions on the blockchain. Having mentioned the use of cryptographic keys before, encryption methods within computer networks may help to strengthen information systems of healthcare providers for future reliability by clients.

The core essential democracy that many experts in the healthcare and blockchain world want is for medical companies to make use of the technology for standards that will enhance interoperability and fight against unwanted uncertainties in data management of patient data under a scalable fashion, minimizing risk of data breach activity and complying overall with medical client consent for management of records on behalf of doctors and healthcare organizations. So to speak, this adoption which for now remains conceptual on a global standard, can be shortened into the acronym HIE, which stands for Health Information Exchange, the simple ability to find ease-of-access and secure shareability methods for electronic health records (EHRs) of patients.

As much as this is all still a newly understood opportunity by some medical companies, major academia institutions such as MIT Media Lab have already researched and funded projects by granting patients access to their personal data in the hands of a blockchain- based platform by the name of MedRec. With this platform, effective management of medical records is done so by creating a list of a patients information within a system, at which it can be documented or shared at any point for when they register or move as a data point within the system architecture, creating security that most medical processes do not make use of as of yet. Altogether, in some major cases, it is important that organizations in need of fine tuning the security and reliability of patient data must recognize the technology for additional cost reduction reasons next to the aforementioned perks, and with how it’s being recognized, it is notable that further development will take place that can eventually scale internationally.