Georgina Kyriakoudes on Implementing a Healthcare Blockchain

Frederik Bussler
Nov 1 · 3 min read

From October 30th to November 1st, hundreds of blockchain professionals from industry and academia are joining forces in Athens, Greece at Decentralized 2019 to engage in workshops, talks, and networking. One prominent keynote speaker was Georgina Kyriakoudes from Dcentric Health Limited, whose talk was titled Implementing a Healthcare Blockchain: The Practical Side of Empowering Patients and Connecting Healthcare Stakeholders.

She began her talk with the background of the idea behind Dcentric:

“Two years ago, I was starting my thesis and deciding what topic to do it in: fin-tech, supply chain, sustainability, there are many interesting topics.

One of my colleagues had a keen interest in blockchain, and one day his wife was rushed to the hospital, and they didn’t know what was wrong with her.

The first piece of info they need is medical history, but the hospital only had the data collected at that hospital.

She waited for three hours in agonizing pain before they decided to take the tests. The hospital didn’t have the needed records.

This is a real-life problem we have: Our medical records are scattered all over. Wearables, insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, and papers at home. The reality is that one day you’ll wish you had access to that data.”

The scattered, messy nature of medical data has real-life consequences, and there might be a blockchain solution. It’s an especially important problem considering how many of us are affected:

“45% of Americans have a chronic disease. Another question is: Where is my data? I don’t remember every visit I’ve had to my doctor. I don’t know if I can trust where my data is.

15 million healthcare records were hacked last year. We’ve seen it in the public and private sectors.

This is a real problem we need to think about. We are becoming more aware of our health. The mobile health industry went from $30bn in 2019 to $290bn in 2025 with a focus on health management applications with the patient as the end-user.”

Clearly, there’s a growing market demand for better solutions, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it:

“We’ve seen companies set up personal health record systems. They expect patients to upload records to centralized systems.

Apple connected with 500 providers in the US. We’ve got companies like United Healthcare doing something similar.

This is great, but the question is do you trust these companies to have control over your data? The FAANGs of the world have basically all the data on us we can imagine, do you also want them to have access to your medical records?

This is an opportunity to start using the latest technologies to secure our health privacy. So, my thesis was on whether blockchain is the answer.”

Rather than using existing methods that have proven unsafe time and time again, Kyriakoudes is using the latest technologies to secure user health data:

“We launched in May this year with a pilot project. We're working with the American Medical Center and in March 2020 will have released all our applications and the blockchain will be ready to be used.

We’re currently developing a private blockchain, and aiming to have multiple nodes from insurance to government and hospitals.

We need to be careful not to have control over the blockchain — though we’re helping develop a consortium, we’re not the controllers.

Our focus will be on the front-end application and providing patients user-friendly access to the data. We create patient copies of records to put on the blockchain. We end up with complete access to medical records.

On top of patients having access, they have data portability and can provide the data elsewhere, such as for the doctor.

The key reason to put health records on the blockchain is immutability. To rely on the record, you need to know there’s no chance there’s fraud.

There are a few key difficulties: GDPR, right to be forgotten, scalability, and so on. But imagine integrated health records in a machine-readable format that’s truly secure and owned by the patient, what kind of applications could we have?”

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