There may be applications such as 'digital notary' that blockchain might
be useful for, which is a trusted third party notary that accumulates
signed hashes of content transactions to the main EHR; if it is thought
that the EHR was hacked or integrity was in question, the digital notary
can be used to check. There was even a gNotary project in gnu health
years ago. But as Grahame says, protecting against transaction errors /
hacking isn't a burning problem to date. However, if you want to
accumulate the whole contents of transactions, blockchain is unlikely to
be be scalable.
Maybe this will change and blockchain will find use there.
- thomas
On 13/11/2017 13:15, Bert Verhees wrote:
On 13-11-17 14:02, Thomas Beale wrote:
...
What openEHR has as an underlying data management paradigm is
distributed version control - each EHR is like a little git repo.
This is no longer new or interesting (in fact, I was exposed to it
from 1988, so really not new), but it's just as applicable today as
it was then. Re-doing all that in blockchain seems sort of pointless.
Yes, health systems can be hacked, but mainly to break privacy, not
to fake transactions. Not what blockchain was designed for (and it's
more or less the opposite regarding privacy).
It is not about hacking why blockchain is interesting, although, that
can happen too. But it is about having trustworthy computing without a
trusted third party. Not only protecting against bad intentions but
also against errors, for example, system which not run synchronous or
have date/time(zone) not well configured. Not a trusted party ensures
delivery and time of delivery and contents of delivery, but blockchain
as a mechanism does.
I have given already a few examples.
Remember, computers make no errors, but people do, and it are people
which configure computers and use them, and their responsibility must
be able to transparently replayed afterwards.
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