Blockchain
See the following -
CMS To Invest $5+ Billion a Year in Open Source and Cloud-based IT Infrastructure for Medicaid
After more than 40 years of relying on monolithic mainframe platforms to administer its services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has embraced a new modular, open and agile approach to Medicaid health information technology for the Federal government and States. In many ways, this is the best of what open source advocates and technology innovators could have hoped for when it comes to open source policy from a government agency. According to Andrew Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS, the agency will spend more than $5 billion a year to fund this transformation.
Could There Be a Blockchain Solution to High Prescription Drug Prices?
Prescription drugs are one of the biggest contributors to soaring healthcare costs in the U.S. And for both individuals and families, particularly where multiple prescriptions are needed, drug expenses can quickly escalate to thousands of dollars. According to a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 8 in 10 Americans would like the government to negotiate prices for those on Medicare. Additionally, Americans want limits set on the amount drug companies can charge for high-cost drugs, such as those to treat cancer...
- Login to post comments
Data Crisis: Who Owns Your Medical Records?
We’ve all encountered issues with our medical records. Whether getting a copy for a second opinion, finding major mistakes, or changing health care providers, our access to this important set of data has been fraught with difficulties. But that’s in the past tense—it’s getting worse. Sadly, your medical records are the property of hospitals, doctors, and health systems. Except in New Hampshire, where ownership rights are assigned to the patient, no other states recognize the individual’s right of control and ownership of their medical data...
- Login to post comments
Distributed Ledgers, the Next Step in Patient Generated Health Data (PGHD) - Part 2
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...
- Login to post comments
Distributed Ledgers, the Next step in Patient Generated Health Data (PGHD) Including Environmental Data
Soon we will be able to access thousands of datapoint into our lives, many will reflect our environment and health. The HHS Idea Labs held a Entrepreneur-in-Residence webinar on December 13, 2016, for recruiting an software architect to assist the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in collecting employment data as it pertains to a persons health. They wish to share/store the collected data in the EHR. Onerous at best, because most EHR today do not have API for uploading data and HL7 standards do not currently provide for discreet PGHD data...
- Login to post comments
Eaten Alive: A Patients’ Perspective on De-Identification of Personal Health Information
In 2018, the majority of people do not know that their PHI, like their EHR data, prescription data, insurance claims, and genetic data via direct-to-consumer (DTC) tests, are de-identified and sold for research and commercial purposes at massive profits. Medical health data trading is a multi-billion dollar industry. The process of de-identification supplies data that may be aggregated for a variety of analyses, such as basic scientific discoveries, policy & legal reviews, process refinement, pharmaceutical marketing, and other efforts. Data de-identification isn’t new but it is rampant. I’m gravely concerned about the free-for-all that is de-identification. You should be too.
- Login to post comments
Estonia Is Using the Technology Behind Bitcoin to Secure 1 Million Health Records
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...
- Login to post comments
Estonia Using Blockchain to Secure Health Records
The Estonian Government will use Blockchain technology to protect citizens’ electronic health records. Digital transactions made with Blockchain technology are irreversibly recorded. The records are impossible to change because they are shared globally across thousands of computers in real time through a distributed ledger. While Blockchain has largely been used to secure payments, Estonia shows that it can be more widely implemented...
- Login to post comments
Estonian Government, Guardtime Accelerate Adoption of Blockchain Technology to Secure 1M Patient Health Records
Guardtime, the first and only platform for ensuring the integrity of data and systems at industrial scale, today announced a partnership with the Estonian eHealth Foundation to accelerate blockchain-based security, transparency, auditability and governance for the lifecycle management for patient healthcare records. Guardtime will also bring their Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) technology to all levels of Estonian eGovernment infrastructure through a frame cooperation agreement with the Estonian Information Systems Authority (RIA)...
- Login to post comments
Europe Pledges Support for Open Source Government Solutions
Estonia has long been the digital envy of many European Union member states. An effective and open policy approach to digital government has yielded extraordinary results—from 90%+ uptake of electronic identification (E-ID) solutions to an open source e-government platform (X-Road) to meet the ever-growing expectations of IT-savvy citizens as well as other countries wanting to pool IT across borders. Perhaps the most significant development for open source supporters is the explicit recognition of open source software (OSS) as a key driver towards achieving ambitious governmental digitisation goals by 2020. Under the declaration, European goverments will...
- Login to post comments
Five Tech Trends Affecting Healthcare IT Today, and Tomorrow
Technology is evolving faster than ever before, and shows no sign of slowing down. Digital innovation has enhanced the way we operate in almost every aspect of modern life, but in the healthcare industry, technology is not only changing lives, it's saving them too. Outlined below are five technology trends that are taking hold of the healthcare IT industry today, and what developments we can expect to see over the course of 2019 and beyond.
- Login to post comments
Five Ways The Internet Of Things Is Already Broken—And How To Fix It
There are some 10 billion internet-connected devices in the world today...But there are some big obstacles before the internet of things can become a viable business...
- Login to post comments
Getting Health IT on the Blockchain Bandwagon
Face it: health care IT infrastructure is a mess. After spending tens of billions of dollars to "incent" providers to move to EHRs, they're using them but are not very happy with them. In a world in which health IT systems should help improve patient care, they're seen more as a burden than as an asset. We now have millions of electronic records that are still way too siloed, and all too often incomplete. Worse yet, when those records aren't being hacked, they are being held captive by ransomware. Enter blockchain.
- Login to post comments
Google to Create Blockchain Style System for Healthcare to Track Patient Data
Ever since Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology became popular, many businesses are trying to find uses for it in their operations. Alphabet, Google’s spin-off holding company is also one such company working on creating a “blockchain-style” system for the healthcare industry. Alphabet’s DeepMind Health has announced its plans to use a distributed ledger-like system to keep tabs on how every bit of patient data is being used. The blockchain like tool goes by the name – Verifiable Data Audit which will be released sometime later this year...
- Login to post comments
Guardtime Secures Over a Million Estonian Healthcare Records on the Blockchain
Guardtime, a cyber-security provider that uses blockchain systems to ensure the integrity of data, is partnering with the Estonian e-Health Authority to secure over a million health care records. Guardtime uses Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI), a blockchain technology that provides massive-scale data authentication without reliance on centralised trust authorities. Unlike traditional approaches that depend on asymmetric key cryptography, KSI uses only hash-function cryptography, allowing verification to rely only on the security of hash functions and the availability of a public ledger...
- Login to post comments