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4 Ways Blockchain Is the New Business Collaboration Tool

Lucas Mearian | Computer World | May 23, 2017

While blockchain may have cut its teeth on the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the distributed electronic ledger technology is quickly making inroads across a variety of industries. That's mainly because of its innate security and its potential for improving systems  operations all while reducing costs and creating new revenue streams. This year, blockchain technology is expected to become a key business focus for many industries, according to a Deloitte survey conducted late last year...

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7 Thoughts on the Importance and Future of Blockchain in RCM

Kelly Gooch and Akanksha Jayanthi | Becker's Health IT & CIO Review | December 30, 2016

Blockchain is being put forward as a new means to potentially help solve interoperability challenges in healthcare. Blockchain technology is a permanent log of online transactions or exchanges. It emerged in 2009 as the foundation for trading the digital currency bitcoin. The entire log is duplicated across a network of computers. Users interactions on the network can add to the record of transactions...

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A Health Hack Wake-Up Call

Niam Yaraghi | US News & World Report | April 1, 2016

Hospitals went digital almost overnight, but they neglected to prioritize patient data protection. U.S. hospitals appear to be under a new type of IT hacking attack: crypto-ransomware. Hackers have changed their approach and instead of stealing patient data, they are now locking down the computer systems of hospitals and asking for a ransom, in bitcoin, in order to allow hospitals to have access to their own computers...

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An introduction to Hyperledger Fabric

One of the biggest projects in the blockchain industry, Hyperledger, is comprised of a set of open source tools and subprojects. It's a global collaboration hosted by The Linux Foundation and includes leaders in different sectors who are aiming to build a robust, business-driven blockchain framework. There are three main types of blockchain networks: public blockchains, consortiums or federated blockchains, and private blockchains. Hyperledger is a blockchain framework that aims to help companies build private or consortium permissioned blockchain networks where multiple organizations can share the control and permission to operate a node within the network. Since a blockchain is a transparent, immutable, and secure decentralized system, it is considered a game-changing solution for traditional supply chain industries. It can support an effective supply chain system by:

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Bitcoin Crowdfunding For Ebola Research And Open Access To Medical Research Papers

P. H. Madore | Cryptoncoins News | October 8, 2014

Kevin McKernan is a scientist working for the firm Courtagen Life Sciences, which specializes in genomic sequencing...“I have come to recognize that the [copyright] system doesn’t work,” McKernan said in a recent interview with Let’s Talk Bitcoin!...

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Blockchain Startup to Secure 1 Million e-Health Records in Estonia

Daniel Palmer | CoinDesk | March 3, 2016

Data security startup Guardtime has announced a partnership with the Estonian eHealth Foundation that will see it deploy a blockchain-based system to secure over 1 million patient healthcare records. Under the deal, the foundation will integrate Guardtime's keyless signature infrastructure (KSI) blockchain into the foundation's Oracle database engine to provide "real-time visibility" into the state of patient records...

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Blockchain, APIs Take a Stab at the Healthcare Revenue Cycle

Jennifer Bresnick | Health IT Analytics | October 27, 2016

Capital One is hoping to bring the blockchain and API tools to the healthcare industry by proving their value in the revenue cycle management arena. A pair of new partnerships between the financial services company and healthcare-focused startups aim to “reconceptualize” the claims management and patient payment processes, using blockchain and API technologies to reduce the time between service and collection...

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Blockchain’s Weak Spots Pose a Hidden Danger to Users

Will Knight | MIT Technology Review | April 18, 2017

Technologists, entrepreneurs, and some big companies are busy dreaming up new ways of using the core of Bitcoin—a distributed cryptographic ledger, or blockchain—to reinvent everything from business contracts and health records to carbon credits and new trading platforms (see “Why Bitcoin Could Be Much More Than a Currency”). However, one expert warns that they may be building their dreams on top of a precarious foundation. Emin Gün Sirer, an associate professor at Cornell University, has been researching ways in which Bitcoin and blockchains can fail...

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Can IBM Really Make a Business Out of Blockchain?

Jeff John Roberts | Fortune | June 28, 2016

You can mark 2016 as the year “blockchain” became a buzzword. It’s not as hollow as “cloud,” which marketers have rendered almost meaningless. But “blockchain” is now at the point where everyone and their dogs want a piece of it. One of the loudest evangelists is IBM, which has been touting the potential of blockchain—a technology that can allow companies to create quick, tamper-proof ledgers—to transform everything from finance to trading to insurance...

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Crowdtilt Launches Free, Open Source Crowdfunding Solution — And It Supports Bitcoin

Eric Blattberg | VentureBeat | February 20, 2014

The crowdfunding company today launched CrowdtiltOpen, an open source crowdfunding solution that enables anyone to crowdfund anything on their own sites. It’s the polished version of Crowdhoster, which the Y Combinator startup unveiled and beta tested last year. Read More »

Cyber-Attacks on Healthcare Institutions on the Rise: Public Health Watch Report

Brian P. Dunleavy | Contagion Live | August 2, 2017

With news this week that White House officials were fooled by a self-proclaimed “email prankster”—who posed as Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s advisor and son-in-law, and recently ousted Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, during correspondences with various cabinet members—it’s worth remembering that there are cybersecurity implications for healthcare institutions as well...

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Cybercriminals Hold German Hospitals to Ransom

Charlie Osborne | ZDNet | February 29, 2016

A number of hospitals in Germany have fallen prey to ransomware, disrupting core healthcare services and internal systems. According to German publication Deutsche Welle, several German hospitals, including the Lukas Hospital in Neuss and the Klinikum Arnsberg hospital in North Rhine-Westphalia have become victims of ransomware...

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Distributed Ledgers, the Next Step in Patient Generated Health Data (PGHD) - Part 2

Jeff Brandt | LinkedIn Pulse | December 27, 2016

An associate of mine provided good feedback on my previous post on Pulse, he disagreed with me in earnest and stated that Blockchain/ Distributed Ledger (DL) wasn't a good platform for storing PGHD (Patient Generated Health Data). I appreciated his comments, I decided to provide a bit more context and information. For those of you that are not familiar with Distributive Ledgers, they are the technology that support Blockchain, which is the foundation of Bitcoin. Basically, Distributive ledgers are an add-hoc standard database with security, transparency and access control more or less built in...

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Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich

Evan Osnos | The New Yorker | January 30, 2017

Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently...

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Estonia Is Using the Technology Behind Bitcoin to Secure 1 Million Health Records

Oscar Williams-Grut | Business Insider | March 3, 2016

Guardtime, a startup that uses technology similar to that underpinning bitcoin to secure public and private data, has signed a deal with the Estonian government to secure all the country's 1 million health records with its technology. The deal with the Estonian e-Health Authority comes alongside a partnership with Estonian Information Systems Authority, which will see more government data move to Guardtime's technology...

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