what is behind the decision to use distributed databases to store healthcare data?
Hi Matutana!
Both due to the blockchain not being a good fit for storing large data and to protect patient privacy, the patients personal data including their medical records need to be stored off chain on IPFS. We only store the referents to that data on the blockchain to act as an index for the data.
A useful analogy for this approach is a library catalog system. The data Coral Health is storing on the blockchain is like a card catalog in a library that contains metadata about the book and a location where the book can be found.
We detail this approach in more detail in section 6 of our white paper (linked above).