When EHR's meet Blockchain. The Future of Healthcare is...
So let me paint you a picture, you wake up Monday morning, start up your computer and receive a You Got Mail alert. Little did you know this was not a good thing. Think WannaCry. For those of you actually living in a bubble, not to be confused with the beautiful Boulder bubble, a couple weeks ago there was a major breach in healthcare software. It affected thousands of hospitals and clinics around the world. It was a virtual virus called ransomware – malware that encrypts data and locks out users from all accessible data. It was highly contagious and spread faster than the plague.
What to say when everyone is still getting AOL alerts?
This is getting out of control. Just like the virus. UK hospitals shut down, Renault halted production, and IT departments everywhere went into a panic, stereotypically armed with nothing but pocket protectors and a mysterious mustard stain. For the happy bubble people, there’s a silver lining. A young man named Marcus Hutchins found the kill switch to deactivate the infection within the week.
Where did this come from?
The mustard stain? Probably, a hot dog from lunch. The massive software epidemic was from poorly leaked security data from the NSA; which leads to the topic of security and how it is becoming the top concern in healthcare IT and just shows us the vulnerability and lack of infrastructure around most EHR systems and their security.
Healthcare industry systems should not be so vulnerable. Where is the Popeye spinach?
What to say to companies who love spinach?
Yum, can you pass more BLOCKCHAIN, please? The most promising way to prevent these types of hacks is by adopting and integrating blockchain as a distributed ledger for our data sharing devices. This is not a code for a video game, but a publicly verified and recorded digital ledger.
I learned about this like three weeks ago but remind me…
Distributed ledgers are a list of actions that are replicated across a number of computers, rather than being stored on a central server. Think of it like a box of Legos. A blockchain by itself is just a data structure, for example, like a Lego castle. You can take out different Lego bricks and put them together in different ways to create completely different castles. Each brick has a fingerprint relating to the content inside it. When bricks are added to the environment it will start to operate like a checks and balance system. If anyone wants to meddle with any of the data (bricks), they have to regenerate all the brick’s fingerprints from that point forwards and the blockchain will look completely different.
Not so great news for hackers.
Since we are talking Legos, I will explain through a Lego analogy. You are a hacker (big brother). You enter the ether of the internet (your little brother’s room). You are looking for your kid brother’s Lego castle to destroy it (because you can and want to have vengeance).
One scenario, your little brother just has a sign up with paper link chain surrounding it saying, “Please Do Not Touch!” All you have to do is one fail-safe swoop to destroy the entire castle. Hypothetically, this is how current security software systems are built now, woof.
The second scenario, your kid brother does not have the castle built but each Lego brick is labeled and scattered across his whole bedroom. It would take you months, years, decades to find each Lego. Then you will have to learn how his labeling system works to put the castle together correctly. Is it worth it? Not to you, you have soccer practice at 6. That is how blockchain would work, theoretically.
But what will blockchain do to benefit the future of healthcare IT? Connected devices in healthcare will monitor patients more effectively and efficiently, it will significantly reduce costs and time receiving and outputting data across vast distances. Overall, it will increase the general livelihood of the entire population. We could be health care’s saving grace, think about it.
