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Current Anonymous healthare data on the blockchain

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islandguy

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Does anyone have any ideas how anonymous healthcare data can be stored on the blockchain.  Imagine how a small community could respond to a growing healthcare problem if they were aware this live data.

Posted on March 9, 2014 at 5:52 PM

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• adam

  

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  Location: California, USA

  Maybe an aggregation of data from personal clouds?
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iDWqbgrQRc
  

  Posted on March 9, 2014 at 5:55 PM
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• loon3

  

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  Location: Rhode Island, USA

  Ken Shirriff's blog post has a pretty good explanation of a basic way to write information to the block chain by converting a 20 character string to hex, then converting that to a bitcoin address.  The address IS your message and any coins you send to that address are burned because no one holds the private keys.
  I wrote a simple PHP script that uses the method explained by Ken.  You can check it out here, http://joelooney.org/bcgraffiti/.  If anyone wants the source, just let me know.

  Posted on March 9, 2014 at 6:27 PM
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• adam

  

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  Coinfolio is very interesting to me, are you currently developing that?  Might like to partner on the project and offer it to the LTB community so people can compete on investing strategies.

  Posted on March 9, 2014 at 6:53 PM
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• Tim Swanson

  

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  islandguy, I recently spoke with Amir Goren who was looking into that fusion: medical records + cryptoledger, to provide HMOs and health providers.  PM if you want an introduction.
  

  Posted on March 9, 2014 at 7:09 PM
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• loon3

  

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  Location: Rhode Island, USA

  I've gotten a little sidetracked lately with other projects (as I'm sure you're used to) so haven't worked on it in a few weeks.  I'd love to jump back into it if you think it's something that would be beneficial to LTB.  
  Send me a PM or email with what you're thinking.

  Posted on March 9, 2014 at 7:20 PM
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• islandguy

  

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  Thanks, for the great responses. These types of solutions is what puts Bitcoin on the big stage. This could make Bitcoin to healthcare what linux and opensource is to google/search.  Of course the point is to use anonymous data with no identity information. it's about releasing the result only, the sort of data that your public stats department has.
  
  Putting your data into personal account/clouds would prevent the data from being frictionless. It  more about the big picture of community health. We all know it takes time to create vaccines and make decisions for large groups of people.
  
  The general idea is to use the Bitcoin blockchain to solve one of healthcare's biggest problems. The principle of constant screening of the larger population.  Spotting big trends in the data, because it is linked to a dynamic charts. Maybe something that GnuHealth can pull this type of data in, to have a live pulse on the community health.
  
  I'll start researching the idea of    "converting a 20 character string to hex, then converting that to a bitcoin address". However there got to be a way to preserve the value of the transaction.
  
  The typical situation would be a doctors office or medical organization would release this anonymous data to the blockchain.  The data could be tagged with some geographic data.  Possibly even the medical organization to validate the validity of the data.
  
  I'm a technology enthusiast, but not a programmer yet.  So I can't run with this myself right away.
  However it's still worth debating the concept. The cost of our healthcare insurance alone is a reason.
  

  Posted on March 15, 2014 at 11:15 PM
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• ZachCope

  

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  The tension between aggregating healthcare data for research vs maintaining individual privacy is massive. In the UK we have more than 15 years of generally high quality primary care and hospital data that could be used for research. Given that medicine has developed by aggregating information from individual patients, the utility of this data set could be massive.Unfortunately in the UK the care.data programme wishes to take this by presumed consent, with no verifiable anonymity in the system, and a central storage centre.Am I correct in my understanding that mathematical functions can be done on multiple cryptographic pieces of data such that the aggregate answer can be verified without knowing the underlying individual pieces of data?I.e. 2 + 7 = 9 could be represented as (crypto function applied to 2) + (crypto function applied to 7) = (crpyto funciton applied to 9).
  If so, those with access to datasets, such as doctor's surgeries, could release information, aggregated from their patients' personal clouds medical records, that does not identify the individual patients.Presumably this would reduce the risk of individual patients being identified, although very rare diseases in a geographical area can complicate this. 
  

  Posted on March 17, 2014 at 8:13 AM
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