We Can’t Even Do The Simple Things in Healthcare and Blockchain

We Can’t Even Do The Simple Things in Healthcare and Blockchain

The NHS Needs To Move Soon To Integrate True Trust … We Need to Start Simple

We need to change our ways, and integrate trust in our health care systems. At the core of this must be blockchain methods, and which integrate identity and where we start to define a core layer of trust.

I had an interesting chat with a health care data architecture last week. “Well, Bill, how is it going to be possible to put patient data onto the blockchain?”, “Well, just don’t do it!”, “Why, I thought that’s what you are promoting?”, “No. Don’t put any personal information onto the blockchain just use it for the proof of identity and hashing transactions. That is what is does best.”, “But what about putting health care on the blockchain?”, “Well, forget about it just, and just do the basics, and open your trust infrastructure up.”

Ask most people what they want for digital services, and repeat prescriptions is likely to be near the top of the list. So I outlined a basic system for this.

Overall it is simple, as Alice the GP just sends a medication note to Bob the Patient and which is signed with the private key of Alice. At the same time Alice puts a hash of the medication note onto a public blockchain and signs it with her public key. There is now a record of the note for its time, and the hash of the medication note. No one can change the note, without someone finding it. And so Bob takes the note to Trent the Chemist, and requests the medication. Trent then checks the signature on the note for Alice, and then checks the signed hash on the blockchain. If they all check, Bob gets his medication.

This is so simple, that it would take less than a week for an undergraduate student who knew a bit about Node.js and digital signing. We can take it up a few levels with a smart contract, and to anonymise the signing, but why bother just now?

So my advice was just to do something simple, and get it working. Once implemented it can be easy expanded. Why can’t someone in the NHS just define that it will start to implement digital signing and open up and commit to revealing signed hashes. At the core must be a more open usage of blockchain, in order to provide the lowest layers of trust.

Come on health care and government departments, move into the 21st Century and start to integrate trust. The reason we have fraud, hacking, ransomware, and many others things, is because we have such low levels of trust in the systems we have created.