I've recently been to a couple of medical practices due to problems with my wrist and discovered an artifact from ancient times - a Digital Video Disc, also known as DVD. This was only the tip of the ice berg. The whole process of practices communicating and working together really caught my attention as it seemed to be stuck in the 1980s. Let's dig deeper:

The pain point

Besides my wrist I encountered one major pain point (pun intended) - the very analog nature of processes in the medical sector. I want to demonstrate this process with a short excerpt of my medical journey:

It started out with with an appointment at an orthopedist. He asked me a couple of questions regarding my medical past and whether I've been to other doctors regarding my wrist. This was the case but since it has been a couple of years - I've had wrist problems for quite a while now - I had a hard time remembering all the different medical findings the numerous experts had given me over the years. There was no way for this orthopedist to check what the others have stated exactly. It all depended on my (bad) memory. My marathon continued with an appointment at the radiologist. The scans were saved on - you guessed it - a DVD! I then had to go back to the orthopedist along with the DVD to talk over the scans. The orthopedist then send me to a physio therapist and noted that if my wrist does not get better, I should see a chiropractic. Unfortunately, my wrist did indeed not get better, so I went to see a chiropractic. There I showed the DVD again. Unfortunately I was not given any findings in written form, so the chiropractic had to call the radiologist and ask for the medical report. Since medical data is quite a sensitive topic, the chiropractic was sent a fax (did not know that these were still used), which I had to sign before it was send back to the radiologist so he could send the record through -- wow!

The solution

Now image a world were all the different practices that I seek out had access to one shared, digital ledger containing all my medial data. This would make the process so much easier. I picture it like the following:
I can grant doctors access to my medical record and allow them to add any new report, pictures or findings so that they are stored and can be accessed by others. The access could be limited for a certain period of time (e.g. the duration of my treatment). I can also only share certain kind of data, for example what medications I have taken during the last few months or only reports from other orthopedists.

Why blockchain

The technology enables control of one's data. In addition the decentralized nature makes it more resilient against hacks as there is no single point of failure - this is really important for sensitive data such as in this case. Also, medical records are by default a case in which different players interact with one specific ledger (each individuals record).

There are already some initiatives out there which directly address this problem - I really hope to see one solution being adopted on a broad scale in the near future.

Here are some that I found:
https://medicalchain.com/en/
https://www.gruenderszene.de/health/blockchain-gesundheitsakte?interstitial_click (Sorry, the article is in German)

It is super interesting to see what blockchain can bring to the table and I am excited to see more and more use cases coming to the surface.

What do you think?
#LifeWithBlockchain
Thanks also to Pascal Mehrwald (@pascalmehrwald), Benjamin Pabst von Ohain (@benpvo), Prof. Dr. Isabell M. Welpe and the TUM seminar team.