The Taipei Medical University Hospital has introduced a blockchain-powered platform to augment medical record-keeping.

 

This is according to a report seen on the Taipei Times.

The “Healthcare Blockchain Platform” was worked on to support the government’s Hierarchical Medical System policy, bolster patient referral services, and incorporate individual healthcare networks to allow people to gain access to their medical records in an easier way. To process a request for their records, patients can just log in to a password-protected mobile app.

 

The project involved more than 100 clinics, which utilize blockchain technology to tackle major issues in healthcare, such as data transfer between medical establishments and patient portals. Through this platform, patients can access “a complete set of all their medical records, including high-resolution medical images, lab results, and clinical and health exam information,” while hospitals and clinics can request, sanction and share patients’ records with the use of smart contracts.

Hospital superintendent Chen Ray-jade was quoted as saying that blockchain would help to reduce the risk of security breaches, saying that “blockchain technology not only helps to combine electronic medical records with electronic health records from multiple hospitals and clinics, it also incorporates the additional security feature of notification and consent before any transfer takes place.”

 

Healthcare establishments all over the world have also used distributed ledger technology in medical data management. Earlier this month, it was reported that South Korean biotech enterprise Macrogen along with local tech group Bigster is working on a medical big data ecosystem that would provide for secure and private storage and transmission of large amounts of sensitive genomic and personal data.