“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act required all public and private health care providers to adopt electronic medical records (EMR) by January 1, 2014, in order to maintaintheir existing Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement levels. This EMR mandate spurred significant growth in the availability and utilization of EMRs. However, the vast majority of these systems do not have the capacity to share their health data.
Blockchain technology has the potential to address the interoperability challenges currently present in health IT systems and to be the technical standard that enables individuals, healthcare providers, health care entities and medical researchers to securely share electronic health data. In this paper we describe a blockchain based access control manager to health records that would advance the industry interoperability challenges expressed in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC) Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap. Interoperability is also a critical component any infrastructure supporting Patient Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) and the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI). A national health IT infrastructure based on blockchain has far-reaching potential to promote the development of precision medicine, advance medical research and invite patients to be more accountable for their health.”
The foregoing quote from the white paper proposal by Laure A. Linn and Martha B. Koo, M.D., entitled “Blockchain For Health Data and Its Potential Use in Health IT and Health Care Related Research” (http://bit.ly/2nIJ9CE) defines and describes the promise of blockchain information technology (IT) for resolving the dilemma of medical record interoperability vs. protected health information (PHI) privacy and security. A Cloud Healthcare Appliance Real-Time Solution as a Service (CHARTSaaS)
integrated development environment (IDE) compliant with the CHARTSaaS IT reference architecture (RA) can be used by healthcare provider subject matter experts to bridge the gap between the closed architecture and limited accessibility of on-premise proprietary electronic health record (EHR) systems and cloud service provider (CSP) Internet-accessible data centers, a.k.a. the Cloud. Please validate this proposition to your own satisfaction by reading the white paper at http://bit.ly/2nhwqpd and then by reviewing the details of CHARTSaaS and the CHARTSaaS RA in these presentations:
Healthcare providers will benefit significantly from appreciating and then applying a CHARTSaaS RA-compliant IT solution. To do so will mitigate medical mistakes (currently the third leading cause of patient deaths. per Makaray and Daniel http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139), thereby minimizing patient adverse events and optimizing clinical case outcomes while maximizing the cost-effectiveness of care and treatment while accelerating the accrual and application of medical knowledge.