A Top-5 US Hospital Is Exploring Blockchain for Patient Data

Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the top-five hospitals in the US, is partnering with Korean blockchain startup MediBloc in an effort to find better ways to store and share patient data.

"In collaboration with Medibloc, we aim to explore potentials of blockchain technology to provide secure solutions for health information exchange, integrate healthcare AI applications into the day-to-day clinical workflow, and support [a] data sharing and labeling platform for machine learning model development."

The trouble with patient data is that multiple entities - hospitals, research bodies, insurance and pharmaceutical companies - need the information about those that are receiving medical help.

They're all keeping their own data that can't be shared securely and often is in various incompatible formats.

A range of blockchain startups have been working on enabling fast and secure transmission of healthcare data.

The reason they are rare is that to share the data, hospitals need full access to it from IT vendors designing data systems for them, said Kamran Khan, CEO of blockchain startup Translo, which also is working on a system for health data within Harvard Innovation Labs.

"Even in Boston, there are 27 different systems for only 17 hospitals, and they lack interoperability. This is done on purpose: once the data is out of the siloed system, the hospital can create their own system."

This is why, to create a new system, a hospital needs to persuade its vendor to provide full access to the data in the existing one and to be really convinced itself that the new system will benefit the institution.

MediBloc's main focus now is building an ecosystem upon which other startups can build their apps for various ways to use and exchange health data.

In the future, users will be able to sell or share their data directly to the buyers, without MediBloc as an intermediary, Kho told CoinDesk.