Even the world’s best health systems are typically fragmented. “You have hospitals, community clinics, general practitioners, specialists, diagnostic clinics, and so on,” says Matt Jackson, who leads blockchain research at Canada’s Institute on Governance.
There are many reasons you might want to give someone access to your medical data. Maybe you just moved to a new city and want to give your new doctor access to your medical history, or perhaps you want to nominate a healthcare proxy in case of emergency or have your prescription sent to your pharmacy.
Some places, like the UK or Canada, have viable national systems for exchanging patient records, but those can be vulnerable to hackers.
In the United States, healthcare comes from a patchwork of private companies, which means the handling of patient data is even more fragmented. John Halamka, chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, told MIT Technology Review last year that there are 26 different electronic medical records systems in his home city alone.
In 2016, Halamka teamed up with a group of scientists at MIT to try to find a solution to the problem using blockchain. They published their white paper on the subject in August 2016, laying out their proposal for a system that would help all those disparate databases exchange data — a project they called MedRec.
Andy Lippman, a senior research scientist at MIT, co-authored the paper with Halamka. The system they outlined was to use Ethereum software — which, unlike bitcoin, can integrate and execute smart contracts — to build a private blockchain, linking healthcare providers together and allowing them to share their data.
On this blockchain, each of these instructions by a patient creates a specific smart contract on the blockchain that only the patient can cryptographically sign.
Security is one benefit: “Distribution makes the system more secure because there isn’t a single place of attack or failure,” Lippman says.
Medical providers run a program module on their computer to access the database, as instructed by the smart contracts, which are initiated by the patient.
That module does three core things: First, it allows the healthcare provider access to the data when the blockchain is instructed to give it. Second, it executes the patient’s instructions as and when needed, sending data to a pharmacy or a specialist for a referral — assuming the patient gives their consent. Third, the module allocates computing resources to maintaining the blockchain.
Taking Back Control
People working in this space often frame the internet as three distinct eras.
Web 1.0 was defined by openness, built on a shared agreement about how pages worked. Everyone settled on HTML, so any browser could display pages from anyone, rather than each company inventing its own format. As the web matured, that openness narrowed: search data and social data were absorbed into a handful of company-owned silos, which is the era we call Web 2.0. Under that model a central authority tracks you, uses the data to serve you, and monetises it by renting the resulting algorithms to advertisers — that is the business model, not a side effect of it.
The era its advocates call Web 3.0 uses blockchain to give people control of their own information, and Web3 development is where that architecture gets built in practice. The shift is from data held about you to data held by you, with others needing permission to see it.
Medical records are an unusually good test of that idea, because no single company has yet become the default owner of them. The opportunity is to design an open, non-commercial standard for health data before one does — closer to what HTML did for the web than to what any platform did for social.
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“The nice thing about medical records is there is no Facebook for medical records yet,” Lippman says. “So maybe we can, in a timely way, do what we’re doing, which is a universal, open, noncommercial design — almost as if we’re designing a web and HTML for medical records.”
“Web 2.0 is when a central authority essentially tracks you, uses that data to help you — and also monetizes that data for themselves by essentially renting the algorithms that result from it to advertisers,” says Diego Espinosa, CEO of Linnia, a startup that is trying to build an ambitious health and lifestyle data-sharing platform on the Ethereum blockchain.
“All of the Web 2.0 giants do that; that’s their business model. So Web 3.0 is: Now we own our data, we have agency over it, and we need permission for others to see it,” Espinosa continues.
“The reason blockchain makes that possible is we can have decent data that can also be trusted. The blockchain is an immutable database and has other attributes, like being able to have digitally signed attestations about us. Those two things have the ability for individuals to keep their data — but also have that data be trusted by others.”
Selling Our Own Data
“The most interesting feature of blockchain in the health sector is the ability of patients to own and control their own health information,” says Jackson, from Canada’s Institute on Governance.
“If all this information was linked to an identity patients control, they could decide who gets to see what. Maybe a knee specialist doesn’t need access to your sexual health history. Blockchain could allow for this level of personal control.”
“Not to mention,” Jackson continues, “those patients could actually profit from their health and demographic data, with the option to sell it to health research studies or drug discovery.”
That possibility has occurred to Espinosa, too. Linnea, unlike MedRec, is a commercial company; while it started out as “a data protocol for longitudinal health,” it has since widened in the scope and scale of its ambition.
For Espinosa, Linnea has become an opportunity to come up with an entirely new way of approaching health — and life.
“The idea was that it has to start with tracking,” Espinosa says. “I’m not necessarily talking about all the ins and outs of data when you went to a hospital. I’m talking about your genome, your nutrition, and your fitness data. Even what your mother’s pregnancy was like; when you were born; your parents’ genome. Your microbiome. All of these things are important to maximizing your health over long periods of time, and yet we don’t track them.”
That data would then be kept on the blockchain, with permission for its transfer given by the patient to a provider via the system, like with MedRec, with the bonus that it’s not just for healthcare providers — we could just as easily send our data to “an insurance company that wants to give you a reward,” Espinosa says.
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The longer-term ambition is to feed all that tracked data into machine-learning models capable of finding durable patterns — the kind that connect a habit in your twenties to an outcome in your fifties. Establishing that causality clearly enough for people to act on it is the point. The prevailing attitude is to do what you like now and treat the doctor as the person responsible for your health, and the argument here is that this gets the responsibility backwards.
Owning your data means having agency over it, and having agency over it changes who owns your health. That is the shift the technology is reaching for, and it remains further off than its advocates expected when these systems were first proposed.
For providers and health-tech teams turning these ideas into working systems, SoluLab’s healthcare software development practice covers the build end to end.
Blog Credits: Medium
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Shipra Garg is a tech-focused content strategist and copywriter specializing in Web3, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. She has worked with startups and enterprise teams to craft high-conversion content that bridges deep tech with business impact. Her work translates complex innovations into clear, credible, and engaging narratives that drive growth and build trust in emerging tech markets.
