Medical Records Will Be the First of Many Blockchain Uses in Healthcare

Inefficiency and regulation are the main ingredients in our current electronic medical records. Inefficiency leads to duplication of tests and inaccurate/incomplete information. Recently I came across a MIT Media Lab project called MedRec.

https://www.pubpub.org/pub/medrec

From their own description:
"It is a novel, decentralized record management system for EMRs that uses blockchain technology to manage authentication, confidentiality, accountability, and data sharing. A modular design integrates with providers' existing, local data-storage solutions, enabling interoperability and making our system convenient and adaptable. As a key feature of our work, we engage the medical research community with an integral role in the protocol. Medical researchers provide the "mining" necessary to secure and sustain the blockchain authentication log, in return for access to anonymized, medical metadata in the form of "transaction fees.""

Over the last 24 hours the company Patientory celebrated their successful ICO token sale. I have admittedly little knowledge of their project but it was encouraging to see one specifically within the health care industry.

I look forward to many more of these types of projects and I hope that their end goal remains improving patient care.