Quote from: medalex on January 15, 2018, 08:44:30 PM

Hi. I have couple of questions about your project.

1. I recently read an article about similar topic - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10916-016-0574-6 and after reading your white paper it is not clear for me how will you store the medical data in your system. In the provided article the authors propose the method to store data in the blockchain cloud as it is makes data immutable and secured. So first question is why don't you consider the blockchain as a storage for data as it sounds quite logical.
2. How re you planning integration with hospitals? As I know there is no common standard and healthcare providers are quite conservative and do nothing without money. What do you think about it?

Thank you for your questions.

First I should say that storing medical data in a blockchain itself is pointless as amount of data is not limited and continues to grow every day. Also data itself is not the same as for transaction of bitcoins or ethereum. Medical data includes also digital images in DICOM standard such as radiology or computer tomography that can be up to some gigabytes. Storing all this in a blockchain theoretically guarantees that data is immutable but technically there is no such a blockchain nowadays. For storing data there are decentralized database such as IPFS and BigchainDB. In our project we are focusing first on data dynamic integration and not storing that makes our system more flexible. After enabling integration we will start to provide personal storage options to individuals but it will not be blockchain may be some decenrtalized database.

First we plan to engage individuals. We are working on providing as much automated services as possible to them in the first stage of the project. These are definitely clinical decision support systems providing individuals with recommendations. Also basic automation with the usage of smart contracts has high priority. Currently we consider the integration with medical vending machines as a first step. You are absolutely right about doctors' attitude to all innovations in IT but we believe that when they understand that individuals can still bring some profit to them by using preventive healthcare services and doctors can focus on the treatment of people who really need it, then it will optimize monetary flow in hospitals and reduces their load at the same time.