How Does Blockchain Protect The Privacy of Doctors and Patients?

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CyberVein

4 min readMar 18, 2020

According to statistics, nearly a fifth of the Chinese doctors work more than 80 hours per week, and some doctors in large hospitals do three operations a day for a total of 17 working hours. Under such circumstances, doctors have become one of the occupations with the highest rates of sudden death, and doctor-patient conflicts occur frequently.

In fact, this problem can be effectively solved through graded diagnosis and treatment. However, subject to various conditions, the implementation of graded diagnosis and treatment encountered various challenges.

Blockchain technology is gradually taking root in the medical industry. Eliminating the data silos between the hospitals, and allowing the patient’s medical information to flow safely. Patients no longer need to go to large hospitals for minor illnesses, which can greatly reduce the amount of doctor-patient conflicts. Blockchain technology can also ensure the safe and efficient circulation of medical data. In addition, in the process of building a blockchain platform, the medical industry will also be forced to continuously improve its level of digitization.

Medical Data Problems

A coronavirus outbreak has made doctors and nurses become a national focus.

It is undoubtedly touching that medical staff across the country are supporting Wuhan and heading to the front line of the epidemic. However, in the face of the epidemic, the medical industry has also exposed a series of problems, such as being questioned about concealing the epidemic data and the difficulty of patient referral.

Can these problems be solved with blockchain technology? The answer is yes. Medical data and information circulation is the first field where blockchain has landed.

Medical data has always been a highly sensitive type of data, and they are often easily leaked.

According to people familiar with the matter, medical data is of great value and, once acquired, can be used for a variety of commercial purposes. Some hospitals are also keen to acquire personal medical information of patients on the black market, and then trick patients into going to the hospital for treatment. In addition, medical data also faces the problem of artificial fraud.

In addition to the data breach problem, the medical industry is also facing the problem of data silos.

According to the survey, China has two sets of health care management systems, a medical management system and a medical insurance management system, but they are not interoperable. Among them, many standards are missing in the medical management system, electronic medical record templates are incompatible with each other, and there are huge differences between provinces; the medical insurance management system has relatively uniform standards, but cross-province is still a problem.

Facing these problems, the medical industry urgently needs the empowerment of blockchain technology.

Blockchain Solutions

Blockchain can break the data silos between traditional medical systems. Blockchain is particularly suitable for data sharing across hospital and patients, it can help by putting the original data or data fingerprints of each system on chain for data circulation, without changing the original system. The sharing of data must achieve the identity verification of the blockchain, and by fusing with carrier aggregation (CA) technology, it can transform the originally anonymized blockchain into a trusted blockchain, dividing rights and responsibilities between systems and personnel through identity authentication and consensus authority settings. A strict time stamp mechanism is set in blockchain, in addition to its own non-tamperable and traceable characteristics, any processing of data will leave marks on the chain and can be traced. At the same time, the potential of big data analysis and artificial intelligence algorithms has been greatly released, enabling more accurate and targeted services and management models.

Medical Data Management

In the medical and health field, the application of blockchain technology can realize the sharing of information between different medical institutions while protecting the privacy of individuals. This data sharing can help facilitating the analysis of larger data sets, building a better model to help with the medical work. CyberVein has a R&D center at Zhejiang University with researchers that are dedicated to the research of blockchain and AI technologies. They have made steady progress in the technology that is supporting CyberVein, and have also succeeded in using federated learning to achieve accurate keratitis diagnosis. The diagnosis of keratitis is a difficult task for the doctors, because the different causes (bacteria, virus, fungi) of keratitis can’t be clearly distinguished by the naked eye, which may result in the wrong treatment plan for the patient. Hospital and patients were also not ready to shared their personal health data with other institutions, resulting in many data silos. However, through federated learning, the researchers were able to use these data and achieved an accuracy of 80% for the diagnosis of the different types of keratitis, which was better than 96% of the doctors who participated in the experiment.

Although China has put a significant emphasis on the development of blockchain, but the industry is still maturing, and many blockchain applications are still being explored. CyberVein is constantly looking for new areas where blockchain can be efficiently and necessarily be applied along with the integration of other technologies such as AI, IoT and big data. China’s blockchain industry will continue to improve, and China may one day achieve its goal to become an authoritative entity in setting the standards for the international blockchain industry.

How Does Blockchain Protect The Privacy of Doctors and Patients?

Written by Ryan