An interoperability deficiency across health record management has always caused unnecessary expenses and time inefficiency in traditional health information record systems. Healthcare workers have found themselves in an undesirable position where they spend more time computing patient information instead of doing their job – patient care.
This inefficiency, coupled with shrinking health care budgets globally, has resulted in smaller core healthcare staff and supporting cast. This recession has further translated to more work for healthcare workers across the board. As a result, burnout among healthcare workers between 2011 and 2014 shot up from 45% to 54%.
The Patientory Blockchain which encompasses the PTOYMatrix network is the answer to limitations currently facing electronic health record systems. These limitations include lack of security, the threat of malware and compromise, interoperability across different third-party systems, a complicated user interface, and poor user experience.
This article will focus on health record management security and privacy and how the Patientory Blockchain has positioned itself as a pioneer in maintaining high-level privacy for patient information.
What is Patientory?
Patientory is a decentralized network for maintaining health records and facilitating health information exchange. The network unlocks the potential of cybersecurity and interoperability across healthcare providers in the storage, management, and deployment of health records. Patientory integrates blockchain and cryptography and has the following advantages: data integrity, trustlessness, efficiency, decentralization, and reduced transaction costs and achieve HIPAA compliance.
How the Patientory Blockchain Achieves Privacy of Health Records?
The Privacy Rule
Your health information should be personal and private, and no one should have access to them without your authorization. Unfortunately, traditional electronic health record systems do not guarantee this level of privacy or security. Patientory defines its privacy standards as the Privacy Rule and outlines them according to HIPAA standards. Actions like health plans, health providers transmitting health records, and healthcare clearinghouses must submit to the Privacy Rule. Every stakeholder must adhere to the Privacy Rule. Anything that falls short of these standards violates the HIPAA privacy rule (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability).
The Blockchain
Patientory employs blockchain technology to deploy a highly secure health records transfer system. Traditional electronic record transmission methods rely on cloud storage to perform its services. Relying on cloud storage providers (CSPs) to store and manage health information removes direct control of this information from the hands of healthcare providers into the hands of a centralized CSP.
Sometimes CSPs have their servers deployed to different geographical locations, making healthcare providers unaware of where the information is located, who has access to it, and what they could do with it. Besides, the healthcare provider is completely dependent on the CSP to deploy other privileges within the health record management system.
Other risks associated with cloud storage of patient information include a high frequency of data replication, increasing chances of data breaches from the multiple points of data management, which usually includes network engineers, admins, and technical experts.
The role of the blockchain as the foundation technology is capturing health records and storing them in a distributed and secure manner. Employing the blockchain assures zero data breaches and allows healthcare providers to achieve ultimate decentralization in storing, controlling, and ownership of health patient information. Simply put, it is a cryptographic transaction on the blockchain that is encrypted by the sender and decrypted for interpretation by the recipient.
In Patientory, the information is encrypted with a complex cryptography code decrypted using private keys accessed only by healthcare providers.
Conclusion
The Patientory team has built a platform based on extensive research of the challenges facing healthcare providers and consumers.
Patientory chose blockchain technology as the impregnable solution to improve the storage, transfer, and access to patient information. In addition, Patientory dApp which uses the same name as the network integrates artificial intelligence algorithms, machine learning, and the internet of things to deliver a state-of-the-art health record system.
