Hi to all, A Blockchain is a public (or at least shared) digital notary.
The easiest (hence probably the more meaningful) use case is to disrupt existing notary systems (disrupt in its accurate definition: deliver something that is initially less powerful, but evolves greatly faster). A Blockchain can come with or without a trusted third party. It seems to me (in such a domain, I know very few people with a firm opinion) that transactions are more expensive without a third party, because you need to make the process of adding a new block "expensive enough" in order to make sure that the one doing it can not deploy enough computing power to hack the existing blocks during the process. However, in real estate, for example, the price of a Blockchain transaction, even if we take the cost of a Bitcoin transaction as a reference, remains far below what we have to pay to register our ownership. In health, I am always amazed by the level of ingenuity of some actors (do you know of any innovation that has not been qualified as "applicable in health"?) and, in contrast, the global archaism of the domain at large. I recently read a paper about a FIHR conference that said that all this is fantastic, but that, in current times, it could be nice not to only exchange information "about the patient" ;-) So... yes, the Blockchain is super trendy... yes there are probably many smart ways to use it in health... but maybe, before considering the use of such marvelous pieces of technology, it could be wondered if the medical domain is not fully missing its inclusion in the information society. Best, Philippe Le 13/11/2017 à 14:35, Thomas Beale a écrit : > > There may be applications such as 'digital notary' that blockchain > might be useful for, which is a trusted third party notary that > accumulates signed hashes of content transactions to the main EHR; if > it is thought that the EHR was hacked or integrity was in question, > the digital notary can be used to check. There was even a gNotary > project in gnu health years ago. But as Grahame says, protecting > against transaction errors / hacking isn't a burning problem to date. > However, if you want to accumulate the whole contents of transactions, > blockchain is unlikely to be be scalable. > > Maybe this will change and blockchain will find use there. > > - thomas > > > On 13/11/2017 13:15, Bert Verhees wrote: >> On 13-11-17 14:02, Thomas Beale wrote: >>> >>> ... >>> What openEHR has as an underlying data management paradigm is >>> distributed version control - each EHR is like a little git repo. >>> This is no longer new or interesting (in fact, I was exposed to it >>> from 1988, so really not new), but it's just as applicable today as >>> it was then. Re-doing all that in blockchain seems sort of >>> pointless. Yes, health systems can be hacked, but mainly to break >>> privacy, not to fake transactions. Not what blockchain was designed >>> for (and it's more or less the opposite regarding privacy). >>> >> >> It is not about hacking why blockchain is interesting, although, that >> can happen too. But it is about having trustworthy computing without >> a trusted third party. Not only protecting against bad intentions but >> also against errors, for example, system which not run synchronous or >> have date/time(zone) not well configured. Not a trusted party ensures >> delivery and time of delivery and contents of delivery, but >> blockchain as a mechanism does. >> I have given already a few examples. >> >> Remember, computers make no errors, but people do, and it are people >> which configure computers and use them, and their responsibility must >> be able to transparently replayed afterwards. > > > _______________________________________________ > openEHR-technical mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org > > _______________________________________________ openEHR-technical mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org
