Has anyone here looked into blockchain applications for healthcare? Or is anyone here interested in doing so? They Hyperledger community for blockchain projects have recently announced a healthcare working group and it’s just getting started.
I was just curious to see if there’s anyone interested in exploring potential partnerships to work together for some experimentation and innovation.
I think we should participate in this, if it will help improve security and distribution of patient records. I can think of parts that could benefit from blockchain in lh-toolkit. Particularly, in improved auditing, as well as sharing of patient records.
I really wanna see this happen.
The following were some of the winners of the ONC awards for use of blockchain in healthcare: http://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2016/08/29/onc-announces-blockchain-challenge-winners.html
Just FYI. HIMSS 2017 will have a section on blockchain in healthcare. I may attend but not sure just yet
There is a bunch of buzz on Blockchain - but having researched the matter in some depth, blockchain will not scale and is not the right solution for distributing health records. I believe the solution lies in another peer to peer structure known as a Distributed Hash Table. I am developing a prototype, but success lies in integrating the DHT within an EHR/EMR application. I would be interested in partnering with an organization to integrate a decentralized and distributed record sharing capability as part of a pilot / SBIR / grant. I’ll be at HIMSS 2017 in Innovation Zone manning the Peer Health booth. You can read the whitepaper here: http://www.peerhealth.io/download/5999/
Mike
Thanks for sharing and suggesting the idea to use DHT instead of blockchain. I’ve seen a few arguments about the scalability problems of blockchain, but I havent seen a real case study, documenting in a good way the speed issues. DHT on the other hand has shown scalability in Bittorrent networks (“trackerless”) data sharing. Your whitepaper is quite interesting and will be good to collaborate on creating DHT support in LibreHealth toolkit or EHR. The whitepaper is suggesting good ideas, but the implementation and design will need to start small, in a specific area of the EMR. We should discuss this further and with specific details. I am quite interested in seeing this move forward.
I will not be in HIMSS, but may be we can discuss what specific areas could be prioritize. Drug, Lab and Radiology orders seem like a good place to pilot this? @tony, @aethelwulffe, @teryhill Does the LibreHealth EHR send surescripts messages when doing drug orders now? Is that interoperability built in? May be you guys can suggest other areas where DHT would be useful to globally track/audit something in the EHR.
Short answer is no, but yes, sort of. There is an interface to something called NewCrop, and some hacks for AllScripts. Tony and others could answer at more length.
I was thinking the following changes in EHR would be helpful:
The two items above would allow for greater extensibility for the EHR in general and would not be use case specific.
Hi @mdufel, have you moved this forward? I see more interest among individuals, like the new JSI post discussing blockchain to be useful for data sharing - http://thepump.jsi.com/how-the-technology-behind-bitcoin-can-strengthen-health-services-protect-patient-privacy-and-improve-trust-in-medicine-quality/ Though, I have yet to see real implementations of this or comparison with DHT.
Hey All, skimming the thread here and I wanted to say hello. I co-founded a software company last year that offers an open source, patient-centered, blockchain/distributed wallet for health information. We’ve been working on it for about 3 years, there’s code available on GitHub, as well as a documented API, whitepaper, etc. at https://developer.youbase.io.
I also encourage you to watch this recent recording discussing why open source should be the way healthcare and blockchain should be applied to healthcare. From MIT technology review with Brian Behlendorf (ED of the Hyperledger project, founder of Apache and CollabNet), and Joi Ito (Runs MIT Media Lab, the “Marc Andreeson of Japan”, Creative Commons, too many to list). Brian was involved in the Connect project, sibling to Direct. Connect was an ope source project mounted by government to create a federated health information exchange system prior to the idea of applying blockchain.distributed tech in healthcare.
http://events.technologyreview.com/video/watch/brian-behlendorf-hyperledger-project-unlocking/
it would be great if we can find a time to host a call/meetup or something like that.
Hi @NateDiNiro , Is there a way we can implement your work with the lh-toolkit or with the lh-EHR project, to see how this will work in real-world implementations? Looked at the youbase documentation, it doesn’t seem to have specificity to health care? By that I mean, is it linked to health ontologies/terminologies or related to the HL7/FHIR interchange formats?
One of my masters student completed her thesis by building a 2-FA on top of OpenMRS/lh-toolkit that then allows clinicians to get information from patient-controlled health records… and then relying on HL7/FHIR in the toolkit to further send this information to the clinician’s EHR.
@downey Great topic you posted Have you seen “working projects” with metrics on how blockchain technology results in lower cost to Public Healthcare.?
Hello @NateDiNiro I am a cardiologist in Argentina Id like to help patients by shortening the time they have to wait for prostesis (hospitalized) Does your software do that?? I can provide a working enviroment to test it at my University (www.unimoron.edu.ar)
What’s ‘prostesis’ ? You may want to look at librehealth EHR for this