1. Blockchain and Health IT: Algorithms, Privacy, and Data

Current ONC standards and goals rely heavily on encryption technology for secure data transmission between organizations in a healthcare IT ecosystem. In an increasingly interconnected healthcare IT system, security is difficult to ensure for all organizations in the larger healthcare IT ecosystem that will have access to PMI data.

At the level of the data repository node, data is encrypted by Enigma and remain encrypted in storage and during computation, which counters internal data theft.

For example, a group of patients may wish to collaboratively compute their average blood pressure information among them, but without each patient sharing actual raw data about their blood pressure information.

One paradigm shift being championed by the MIT OPAL/Enigma community is that of using “pre-fabricated” queries (e.g. SQL queries) that have been analyzed by experts and have been vetted to be “safe” from the perspective of privacy-preservation. The term “Open Algorithm” (OPAL) here implies that the vetted queries (“algorithms”) are made open by publishing them, allowing other experts to review them and allowing other researchers to make use of them in their own context of study.

Precision medicine is an innovative approach that provides a holistic understanding of a patient’s health, disease and condition, and a means to choose treatments that would be most effective for an individual.

2. Blockchain: Securing a New Health Interoperability Experience

Patient data as a service - One of the blockchain’s healthcare interoperability strengths is its ability to replace the concept of a PHR in a way that makes patient data accessible “as a service.”