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Why does this doctor ask me so many things? I know my father had asthma and his Ventolin had been changed for another bronchodilator that allowed him to breathe better, but I do not remember the name. I don't remember anything else that matters with my admission to the hospital today because of the dizziness, but maybe I'm wrong. I ask her if she can not see her history. Innocent question, I know that medical data are not shared and if I change my community or country, I can now recover my medical file so I can take it with me. With how easy it is to send information, why could not the same thing be done with medical records?

This car interests me, it is just the model I was looking for with half price with only 20,000 km traveled. If I could trust the seller, that the car has not had an accident, that it has complied with all the checks and that it really only has 20,000 km, it would be my car. I take a risk?

I want to enroll this job offer, they ask for Graduates in Computer Science. Even if I do not have it, I'm going to sign up. Total, they will not verify it. I can create documents in case they request it.

All these cases have several points in common: the data that would be necessary to consult are registered in some place (health center of a community, vehicle of the seller, university ...) to which a third party (doctor of another community, buyer, company who contracts ...) does not have access but that the owner of the data would be interested that, temporarily, could verify them and verify their veracity.

A new technology works on solving these problems, the Blockchain. Being originally linked to the Bitcoin project, the virtual currency devised by a certain Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 (and whose identity is still unknown), the underlying architecture has been and continues to be the origin of many investigations in the engineering and mathematics environment.

Based on the idea of ​​a common distributed record, such as registering the property or a ledger, where once an operation is entered - including a new title, writing a new patient report or writing down a new mileage - it is irrevocably saved. In addition, that record does not belong to a particular entity / company, but is maintained and updated by all participants who can enter data in the book.

The privacy of registered operations, which assures us that these data, although in a register shared by many participants, remain anonymous and can only be deciphered by those with the proper authorization, comes from the hand of cryptography. The assurance that no dishonest participant can enter duplicate data in the registry (what is known as double spending) is based on the consensus strategy among the participants, with the most extended strategy being the "Proof of Work". , where a computationally expensive test is required before you can record a note in the book. This test guarantees mathematically that if there are a majority of honest participants in the system, attempts by dishonest participants will not be taken into account.

Once the more or less created model, several consortia and companies have set up teams of developers to move from the model to the software that implements it.

Universities, technology centers and technology companies have launched their projects to create the solutions we need: MIT and Harvard work on the MedRec project aimed at the use of Blockchain for medical records, the European Commission has presented a case study for the use of Blockchain in education, Airbus presents its use cases linked to Industry 4.0, and a thousand examples.

Technology centers such as CTIC already have a prototype running on Ethereum to manage a common data record on vehicles, companies such as Capgemini, with a large portfolio of financial companies as customers, study the possible use cases to improve their services with Blockchain,

And although the enthusiasm in this new technology has permeated our computer world, with so many cases of study, news and improvements, they are still in beta, in ideas working in the prototype version but not in real scale. And it is that the architecture that imposes Blockchain supposes a change of important mentality for programmers and architects, imposes an understanding of its complexity to avoid deployment problems and updates, besides understanding the difficulty of scaling the solution to give support to the real world. But major problems have solved the Computing. Waiting for this immediate future take the medical file with you.

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