Standardized and encrypted healthcare records. It means wherever you travel you can: 1. Access your health records at your discretion; and 2. Make sure these records are never lost and 3. These records are immutable.
Encrypted records can be easily added by any doctor/clinic as your public key is publicly available.
Healthcare records frequently need to be modified (e.g. a test was done incorrectly and needs to be voided). Sure, you can stick another entry in there saying "modify this other entry", but then any operations involve canonicalizing the state by scanning the entire subsequent chain. All the caching/indexing optimizations I can think of to make this not a complete nightmare also break all the data privacy and RTBF protections patients have.
There's also a lot of healthcare data. Is there any blockchain that scales to literally petabytes of data a year per facility/organization?
The scales are completely different orders of magnitude. Crypto chains are miniscule, a few hundred GB max and even that's problematic for a lot of devices. A single CT scan is something like 20+ GB. There are ~220,000 of those in the US every single day and probably billions or trillions of other little things being logged. You can store offchain, but then you're a. Centralizing things again and b. Probably violating patient data privacy.
Decentralized data stores exist. IPFS is perhaps the most widely known. But if you discount imaging and store only medical summaries (which if we're being honest is often the only thing doctors look at after the fact anyways), it would definitely be technically feasible.
I would imagine the complexities of building and rolling out such a system would not be technical. Imagine trying to get 200+ countries to agree and implement a standard to store healthcare records, blockchain or no blockchain.
See the other responses for more, but would be curious how that discretion is completely lost when you want to proove something?
Geberally surprised about the false beliefs around anonimity on block chains, as soon as you have the right anchors they are the most tracable.
Or do you mean you sit at the doctor on your vacation, pull out an app to access your CT scan and hand it him over somehow or what is the use case here really? Seems so unrealistic on manu levels and much more easily realized with more solid tech, sorry?!
> Encrypted records can be easily added by any doctor/clinic as your public key is publicly available.
Yes, crypto101, which works fine without any blockchain?
This is probably a non-starter in many cases. In my country, we had an e-health system that had millions invested in its development (we're a small country) and yet didn't work, nor was it really compatible with the systems already in place: https://www-delfi-lv.translate.goog/news/national/politics/e... (translated link)
> Title: E-health is written off: those responsible for the "fraud" worth millions went unpunished, will create a new system
> Excerpt: Its unpredictable operation has caused quite a lot of worries not only for doctors, but also for patients, who may go to the pharmacy for the medicine prescribed by the doctor and not get it, because e-health has rebelled. Likewise, e-health tends to be incompatible with the local systems of some large medical institutions, so there are situations when the electronic referral of a family doctor to a medical institution must be printed anyway.
> On the other hand, doctor Nīcmane-Aišpure remembers a case when she visited a patient during a home visit, concluded that the condition was serious, wrote an electronic referral to call an ambulance, but "the ambulance is unhappy because the electronic referral cannot be opened".
> The eHealth system also still requires users to perform many manual steps. "It is a manual system, where at best you can extract some Excel files," says Solvita Olsen, a sworn lawyer and associate professor at the University of Latvia, who has been following the e-health saga since its inception.
And that was a system that didn't even try anything new, how do you imagine most mediocre countries out there will manage to deal with the technical complexity of blockchain based systems? Why even bother at that point, wouldn't they be better off with an XML or JSON schema or whatever other lowest common denominator one can come up with, to have some base data about the person and then additional bits that might be dependent on each country's laws?
It's not like there aren't people that enter the data in these systems anyways, in your example of shipment tracking, someone could enter whatever data they want regardless. Want to make it appear that a package has left the country, even when you haven't bothered to send it out? Sure, just bribe whoever is running the system, very much like: https://xkcd.com/538/
