Blockchain Technology in Healthcare
Health information technology and information security specialists are hearing a lot about blockchain these days. “It’s the answer to interoperability. ” And “the technology can solve healthcare’s looming security problems.” But what the heck is blockchain, anyway? The so-called digital ledger technology was developed in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, a possibly pseudonymous person (or perhaps multiple people) who designed it as the underpinning for the exchange of the digital cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin. Blockchain transactions are logged publicly and in chronological order. The database shows an ever-expanding list of ordered “blocks,” each time-stamped and connected to the block that came before it — thereby constituting a blockchain.Crucially each block cannot be changed, deleted or otherwise modified: it’s an indelible record that a given transaction occurred. That’s exactly what has many in healthcare excited about blockchain’s potential for data security. Its open and d