Inspiration
Currently, private health care companies maintain full control over a patient's medical data. If a patient changes health care companies, it is the patient's full responsibility to facilitate the transfer of their medical history from one provider to the next. Often, this process is lengthy and can require the patient to request their previous provider to fax their medical data to the new provider. Our platform aims to remove these inefficiencies surrounding the transfer of medical data.
What it does
Create and store HIPAA and FERPA compliant medical records on a decentralized network. Provide a platform for parsing and analyzing large datasets which maintain patient anonymity while providing sufficient information to glean valuable insights. Allow patients to seamlessly transition to new health care providers and eliminate existing inefficiencies with transmission of medical data from provider to provider.
How we built it
Using Python and Flask, we built a working prototype of a blockchain capable of storing the necessary medical information. Through a web interface, the medical history of an individual can be accessed by both their healthcare provider and the patient themselves, provided the appropriate permissions have been granted. Further, interested researchers can access the large dataset of plain-text information stored across the blockchain to discover new insights capable of improving health care outcomes.
Challenges we ran into
The primary challenge we ran into was deciding what medical data can be stored in plaintext to provide researcher's with valuable data sets without compromising patient anonymity or becoming non-compliant with regulations.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Figuring out a method to easily index, search and retrieve an individual's full medical history without having to traverse the entire blockchain.
What we learned
Coming into the project we had a basic understanding of blockchain technology and had the goal of improving our knowledge. By building this project we feel we've achieved a much deeper understanding of the technologies which underly blockchain systems and hope to use this knowledge in the future.
What's next for Health Ledger
Building a more robust blockchain backend and increasing decentralization and redundancy across the network by adding new nodes. We also want to create a user-friendly mobile and web application to interface with our blockchain and allow for ease of use.
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