More articles from Volume 1, Issue 1, 2018
Ethics Governance Outside the Box: Reimagining Blockchain as a Policy Tool to Facilitate Single Ethics Review and Data Sharing for the 'omics' Sciences
Public Health Surveillance using Decentralized Technologies
Separating Signal from Noise: Advice for Blockchain Startups
Letter from the Editor
Blockchain as a Foundation for Sharing Healthcare Data
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A Pragmatic Solution to a Major Interoperability Problem: Using Blockchain for the Nationwide Patient Index
Abstract
Associating the health-related records and transactions of patients with their numerous “identities” as they interact with different healthcare providers, payers, pharmacy benefit managers and other entities is an expensive and complex problem. With many years of experience addressing this issue in different healthcare systems and Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), it is apparent that there is now a compelling and relatively straightforward technical solution for this problem. Presented here is a broadly feasible and technically compelling argument for a blockchain-based approach to addressing these issues. At the same time, challenges ahead and potential strategies to address them are discussed.
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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