Would we be facing an epidemic if medical records were decentralized?
You’d think a local doctor would have the authority to sound the alarm after recognizing serious symptoms, knowing what he or she was facing. You’d think that doctor would be encouraged to communicate with other doctors, and share concern, without facing censure and punishment for focusing potential embarrassment on a municipality. You’d think regional or national medical officials would have systems in place to head off the spread of contagious and deadly invaders as soon as they are identified. And you’d really, really think that those officials would do anything BUT hide the information or mislead the public, both of which can put many thousands of people in grave danger.
But you’d be wrong. Because now we have the coronavirus epidemic — not yet, as of this writing, being called a pandemic — because we still leave health decisions to officials instead of trusting disease information to the blockchain.
Blockchain has many benefits in health management
We tend to focus on blockchain’s ability in the healthcare setting to safeguard patient data and make it portable, as well as the role it can play in streamlining care. There’s no question that transparent, authorized access to medical records would save time and money and begin to eliminate the miscommunication and associated costs as doctors, facilities, pharmacies, and insurance companies try to talk to one another.
There’s also a spin on supply chain management that affects health care. Security comes from knowing the source of medications and the chain of custody from production right down to the little plastic bottle on the medicine cabinet shelf. If anything has been tampered with, or there’s been any sort of contamination or other problem, the blockchain can alert us.
As well it can when there’s been an outbreak of something potentially deadly, even if that problem is halfway around the world.
That long, deadly wait for humans to act
Why should we wait for doctors to know what is making their patients sick, especially if that something is something we’ve not seen before? Why must we trust politicians and officials to give us the word about a new virus, when information about patient care and prescriptions written, anonymized to protect privacy but amassed to chart and establish patterns, can alert us so much sooner and without fear of political ramifications?
We are talking about global health security, and we can’t leave that up to some police official in a distant province in China. This is one of the reasons Aeryus has been so keen to make blockchains interoperable. Despite different systems and different blockchains around the world, we really do have the ability to take the surveillance and analysis of this information out of the hands of individuals, and give it to the blockchain to alert us before any human would know what was afoot.
The really sick detail about this coronavirus is that one courageous doctor did sound the alarm. Dr. Li Wenliang had the gall to post to a chat group he shared with his medical school alumni that something like SARS was identified at his hospital in seven patients who had been to a Wuhan seafood market. For his trouble, he was hauled in by police, interrogated, threatened, and forced to sign a statement that it was all a rumor. That was back in December, when this was all still relatively contained. Now, infection totals are over 37,000 and more have died than from SARS. Li was among them, after testing positive on February 1.
And still, the misinformation continued, with the state and hospital officials making conflicting claims leading up to the eventual acknowledgement he had died.
Li is being hailed as a hero now. In his name, we should begin the international effort to put medical records in decentralized databases, where they belong.
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