Improving Healthcare Data Access

Public trust toward companies that manage online personal data continues to diminish. This is especially true within the healthcare industry. At present, blockchain technology has the potential to provide patients with access and control over their own data (via a private key).

Unfortunately, storing patient data on the blockchain merely defeats patient privacy concerns (even though addresses are not directly linked to personal identity). If a blockchain address reveals a patient’s identity, the patient’s entire transaction history can be accessed via the blockchain. For the healthcare industry, this is a little-discussed but highly problematic concern.

In contrast, XTRABYTES removes the need for any actual patient data to be stored in a blockchain structure. For instance, if actual patient data is stored on a local device, a patient may employ XTRABYTES’ PoSign (Proof-of-Signature) without revealing their data to the network. Indeed, they may also share data conditionally (depending on the application) using strict access control (as determined by the data owner). For the XTRABYTES user, private storage and conditional access of patient data are very real options. This capability is particularly important to the healthcare industry, as healthcare providers currently cannot reveal data on a public ledger in a trustless state.

Improving Healthcare Data Security

At present, electronic medical records are still stored in what can best be described as centralized data silos. Consequently, patient data is highly prone to hackers (which includes social security numbers, driver’s license numbers and credit card numbers)

As such, healthcare providers may be interested in blockchain technology solely because it helps prevent data breaches. It does this by eliminating any single point of failure. Unlike a client-server system, the blockchain relies on a distributed network and is thus far less susceptible to hacking.

However, XTRABYTES has gone a step further by decentralizing all of its network components. As such, it does not store, validate or protect data in the same location. Consequently, its data integrity protection chain (XCHAIN) is limited only by how quickly patients/healthcare providers can add and validate data on it (a feature actually enables far greater protection of network data than what is provided by a classic blockchain). Instead, data entered by patients/healthcare providers will enjoy its own protection as well as the overall protection for all entries per specific time frame.

For security purposes, XTRABYTES retains strict rules for who can do what on the network (as a way to prevent bad actors from taking over the network). As added protection, the XTRABYTES network offers the necessary transparency for identifying who is acting in good faith and who isn’t. This feature enables our decentralized network management service to act accordingly.

Finally, XTRABYTES will employ a variety of encryption schemes for our various network components. By allowing for diverse and flexible security, XTRABYTES aims to ensure its superiority over networks with singular encryption schemes. And by preventing one encryption scheme from becoming a single point of failure, this approach improves the decentralized nature of our network. For more information about XTRABYTES’ quantum-resistant security, readers can learn more here.

Full & Flexible Patient/Provider Data Control

XTRABYTES goes a step further and decentralizes healthcare data validation as well. It’s not up to XTRABYTES network nodes (STATIC nodes) to validate data. Instead, every data transaction will have at least 2 states (transaction request & transaction validation), data validation can be achieved on both the server-side (STATIC nodes) or the client-side (individual network users).

Obviously, this option provides greater opportunities for patients to control their healthcare data control. Consider a scenario in which patients may seek to send data to their healthcare provider. They send a transaction request and await transaction validation (an option that provides healthcare providers with some control as well).

Thus, patients will be able to (possibly) recall a transaction request, particularly in the case of an error (wrong address, wrong medication, …). And the transaction’s recipient (healthcare provider) will be able to either accept or reject this transaction request.

Likewise, healthcare providers and patients will be able to review all transaction requests and validations (both rejections and approvals). Patient data can be recorded on the data chain that supports these (data) transactions. This improves network transparency and helps us identify the trust level of various network entities.

Healthcare providers wary about network congestion within the blockchain need not worry with XTRABYTES. Since it has decentralized its data validation process, it has removed any issues that might be associated with network congestion or it’s ability to process data transactions. In other words, data processing is no longer limited by the performance of one single entity. This, in turn, guarantees a network capable of unlimited speed and scalability.

A Brief Word about Healthcare Interoperability

Healthcare IT systems often have to contend with incompatible records systems. Consequently, attempts to seamlessly exchange patient data can be a real headache. As noted above, however, XTRABYTES PoSign can provide data integrity protection for a multitude of data structures (centralized, decentralized, public or private). Furthermore, XTRABYTES’ code-agnostic capabilities ensure that any application can be hosted on our platform (whether built in Python, C++, Java, or any other language).

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