Managing Lifetime Healthcare Data on the Blockchain

Abstract

The widespread adoption of fax machines in the 1980s revolutionised everyday communications. It was quickly adopted as the standard form of communication across the globe. Since then, the internet has replaced fax as a truly global form of instant communication. However, the fax machine still reigns as the primary form of communication in a number of industries, healthcare being one of them. This paper presents a system that uses a blockchain and an off-chain centralised data storage to give patients and medical professionals instant access to their medical records from anywhere. By assigning each medical record a pseudo anonymous identifier, a second layer "blockchain" for each user can be created allowing for the rapid collection and querying of data. The off-chain pseudo anonymous data storage allows for the data to remain unencrypted enabling the rapid generation of anonymous medical datasets which can be used for machine learning and data mining on the data, potentially bringing many benefits to the healthcare industry.