How could you keep a decentralized database of patient data and keep it secure and yet useful for the medical professionals who need it?
This is an argument I frequently make when people talk about decentralizing medical records, and I am yet to hear a coherent answer. The entire point of a medical database is to be under tight control of one or two parties, and to give secure access only to those who need it. Spreading your database out across multiple remote computers and locations makes this security more difficult, not less.
A guy gets injured in Indiana, but he's from Rhode Island and all his medical info is in R.I. How does the blockchain help the doctors in Indiana treat the guy at their hospital?
It doesn't. Creating a single blockchain for all patients is completely unrealistic. The average patient generates approximately
80mb of medical data per year. A blockchain for all 300,000,000 US patients would grow at the size of 22 PETABYTES per year.
Currently where I work, we have a single Electronic Medical Record (EMR) for all patients in our district. We also have direct access to the EMR systems of all neighboring districts. Any patients from further afield than that, we simply email a request for their EMR to be transferred across, or phone to request the transfer if it is an emergency. All this is done with centralized systems, and it all works perfectly well. The entire system is continuously monitored to ensure you aren't accessing any records that you shouldn't be - family members, colleagues, etc. Given at any one time there are potentially thousands of records being updated by various staff, having one centralized database means everyone is always working from the most up-to-date information. Literally milliseconds after the lab tech confirms a set of blood tests, the results appear on my screen, which is crucial in an emergency situation where seconds count. If someone can tell me how a blockchain would improve on any of this, I'd be very interested. Instead, I usually just hear the same nonsense spammy answers like "it will increase transparency" and "it will remove corruption".