Blockchain and Patient Digital Identity

Denis Baranov has been successfully working on DataArt blockchain projects for five years, and he sees the future of blockchain in healthcare as a technology that will help create patient digital identity.

In his view, blockchain is currently experiencing an early adoption cycle because healthcare is a highly regulated industry. As a consequence, it is not possible to experiment with technologies that are connected to patient data. One of the most promising uses for blockchain in healthcare is creating patient digital identity.

Denis points out that many healthcare providers around the world are still using paper-based systems, which makes it very hard to exchange health information, particularly when travelling. Therefore, if we talk about patient verification and identification, establishing a patient digital identity is paramount. People live and work in different countries and travel a lot, so a health passport could make it possible for travelers to access the care they need by giving physician’s access to critical medical information.

Control over patient medical data is another issues that can be addressed by blockchain technology. Baranov mentions that a common goal is to bring data under control and return it to patients as users. A decentralized identity network will help patients have their own data in their hands, control who gets access to that data, share data with a third party when necessary.

He also discussed another key issue in healthcare – data security. He noted that data security is itself a very complex topic that goes beyond technology, extending to how access to data is organized. Blockchain principles can be applied to make patient data secure through decentralization and encryption. Blockchain identity systems can store patient data in an encrypted and decentralized network. Protocol for self-sovereign identity and other principles allows end-users to have access to that data, control who else has access to the data, and grant limited access or decline that access to a third party. Blockchain technology makes it possible to look at data security from different angles.

These are just some of the points that were covered in the podcast. The full version of the podcast about blockchain and patient digital identity is available in SoundCloud.