blockchain technology

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Blockchain in Healthcare Today Debuts First Ensemble of Articles for Healthcare Industry

Press Release | Partners in Digital Health | March 27, 2018

The online peer review journal, Blockchain in Healthcare Today (BHTY), has published its first articles to augment the industry's knowledge-base. The announcement of the journal came last June, when the Founder of Partners in Digital Health, Tory Cenaj, announced the launch of a journal focusing exclusively on blockchain technology for the healthcare marketplace...Blockchain in Healthcare Today is an open-access publication that publishes methodologies, pilots, and scalable and sustainable blockchain deployments, exclusively, in the healthcare ecosystem. The Journal offers rapid, peer-review publication of research, commentary, and proof of concept for blockchain technology and related areas. No subscription fees are paid to view content or to subscribe/register with the journal.

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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.

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Hackers Are Coming for Your Healthcare Records -- Here’s Why

Lucas Mearian | Computer World | June 30, 2016

Data stolen from a bank quickly becomes useless once the breach is discovered and passcodes are changed. But data from the healthcare industry, which includes both personal identities and medical histories, can live a lifetime. Cyberattacks will cost hospitals more than $305 billion over the next five years and one in 13 patients will have their data compromised by a hack, according to industry consultancy Accenture. And a study by the Brookings Institution predicts that one in four data breaches this year will hit the healthcare industry...

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Halamka Evaluates Blockchain for Health Information Exchange

Yesterday, I read a New York Times article about a possible successor to Bitcoin called Ethereum, which provides a distributed database (no central repository) for the purpose of tracking financial transactions. I immediately thought of the challenge we have turning silos of medical information into a linked, complete, accurate, secure,  lifetime medical record. Might blockchain technology be useful in healthcare?   I posted the question to my colleagues, Arien Malec (VP, Data Platform and Acquisition Tools at RelayHealth and the new Chair of the HIT Standards Committee) and David McCallie (SVP of Medical Informatics at Cerner).

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How Blockchain Can Give Physicians the Power of Information

Irene Tien | Emergency Medicine | October 11, 2018

One of the more progressive concepts to help physicians to develop a collective voice is the use of blockchain technology. HPEC is a start-up created by Emergency Medicine physician Leah Houston, MD to harness the power of blockchain to decentralize ownership of information (in this case, your professional information as a physician) and create a virtual physician community. No more updating your credentials with a third-party every year (think CAHQ) so that that information can then be sold to future employers or hospitals looking to credential you.

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Hyperledger Announces the Hyperledger Healthcare Working Group

Press Release | Hyperledger | October 3, 2016

Today, Hyperledger is announcing the formation of the Hyperledger Healthcare Working Group (HLHC Working Group)...The HLHC Working Group’s mission is to house and foster technical and business-level conversations about appropriate applications for blockchain technology in the healthcare industry. These conversations will be broad and educational, but will eventually focus on identifying opportunities for near-term collaboration between participants on common software to implement a given application. If appropriately scoped and resourced, these conversations could lead to one or more proposals for new software development efforts to be hosted at Hyperledger.

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On the Need for a Universal Health Record

The current path of progress of the EHR, with its concentration on “meaningful use,” and an intellectual property regime that does not fully exploit the capacity for innovation by end-users is approaching an evolutionary dead-end. It is time to treat the EHR as what it should be: an integral part of medical care that has limitless potential for maximizing the use of information acquired in the provision of health care, and not an impediment to optimal care and a bugaboo for the physician. Read More »

The Current State of Blockchain and Where it's Going

In an earlier post, Blockchain evolution: A quick guide and why open source is at the heart of it, I discussed the first generations of blockchains: the public Bitcoin and cryptocurrency blockchains, followed by the Ethereum blockchain capable of executing programs ("smart contracts"), leading to permissioned versions of code-executing blockchains (e.g., Hyperledger Fabric, Quorum). Let's step back into the blockchain jungle and take a look at the current state of the ecosystem and the projects trying to solve some of the limitations of blockchain technology: speed and throughput, cross-blockchain information and value exchange, governance, and identity and account management.

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UNICEF launches Cryptocurrency Fund to Support Open Source Technology Benefiting Children

Press Release | UNICEF | October 9, 2019

UNICEF will now be able to receive, hold and disburse donations of cryptocurrencies ether and bitcoin, through its newly-established UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund. In a first for United Nations organizations, UNICEF will use cryptocurrencies to fund open source technology benefiting children and young people around the world. Under the structure of the UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund, contributions will be held in their cryptocurrency of contribution, and granted out in the same cryptocurrency. "This is a new and exciting venture for UNICEF," said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF Executive Director. "If digital economies and currencies have the potential to shape the lives of coming generations, it is important that we explore the opportunities they offer. That's why the creation of our Cryptocurrency Fund is a significant and welcome step forward in humanitarian and development work." Read More »

OpenEHR Day

Event Details
Type: 
Conference
Date: 
October 28, 2019 (All day)
Location: 
London
United Kingdom

Over the past years, openEHR solutions with a multivendor environment built on an open and agile architecture have proven to be a successful approach to managing electronic healthcare records at any scale. There are several use cases with a focus on electronic health records (EHR) and related systems, validating the vendor-neutral data concept, where universal interoperability among all forms of electronic health data is ensured.To discuss these topics and present successful use cases, you are kindly invited to the 2019 openEHR day being organized by the openEHR Foundation in collaboration with Better and other partners. The event will take place on Monday, October 28, 2019, at SkillsMatter London, United Kingdom. Read More »