You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: Meet Medibyte - A Decentralized Electronic Health Record System

in #blockchain7 years ago

Thanks for the great description of the Medibyte project; however, I seem to be missing the point somewhere. Many governments and related bodies around the world are working on EHR systems. Further there are many medical practitioners, ie. those that actually practice, that recognise the complexity of managing a patients conditions properly when there is such an array of information in existence but it is not always available - so they rely on taking a patient history (and what the patient is willing to provide , can remember or thinks is pertinent to the situation).
Governments indicate they want these systems for their citizens so they can better manage an individual's health care and bring down sky-rocketing costs within the system that taxpayers fund. All very laudable.
What is the problem with a blockchain based EHR - the first and major thing is that it is "immutable". So my practitioner sees me for the flu and updates the EHR but accidentally indicates I have a degenerative heart condition - sorry pressed the wrong key and was distracted at the time. I now have a record in the system that cannot be retracted only noted by a later update. Even worse, medical practitioners around the world frequently misdiagnose a condition - this would end up in the record. Sure another may find this is wrong and the blockchain may indicate that a particular practitioner has a history of misdiagnosis so he/she can be removed from practice - good for the blockchain. The issue is that once something is written down it tends to become history - be it right or wrong - as many have found out with Facebook and other social media applications.
I personally will avoid any system that seeks to record my health records in a consolidated manner (for my life) - when I know that much of it will most probably be misused by governments, medical practitioners, insurers, etc, etc. An EHR needs to be able to be changed with incorrect records or ones that are no longer pertinent being removed - the blockchain does not allow this.
You have been upvoted as I believe that this type of activity needs a rigorous discussion.