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Comment by thebean11 | Hacker News Reader

I think that's the killer feature personally (I work in the space). It has uses for censorship resistant communication and things like identity. Not sure if I see the use case in health data though.

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AFAIK all transactions on a blockchain require spending some associated currency (e.g. "gas fees"). For investors, I think the killer feature is being able to make money off of every transaction involving identity and health data.

Yes, the gas fees would be very expensive in the current state (think hundreds to thousands of dollars for a regular appointment, tens of thousands for an x-ray). There would have to be some benefit for healthcare providers to pay that and I don't see what that is..

Maybe not the healthcare provider, but a service that allows the patient to be in control of their health records. Control who can read and write to their own data. And is it not up to the implementor of the blockchain, to specify how difficult it is to calculate a new block? So lowering the "gas price"?

I think a system like that is a great idea, I'm just not sure how a blockchain helps. The things that make a blockchain interesting (uncensorable, immutable etc) aren't that important here, and with a public blockchain you still need a whole separate system that's doing access checking (maybe your doctor has a key that decrypts the onchain data). To me that system of sharing data with providers, and giving them credentials to access the data is the difficult part, and blockchain doesn't help.

Well, I do think that that is exactly things that are important. You'd want uncensorable, to give transparency to the patient. E.g. a hospital can't add a record without you knowing, that you might not want an insurance company to have access to later.

Immutable, as a patient you would want to know exactly what your data looks like at any given time. Again insurance is a good example.

If the blockchain is private, could it not be part of the implementation that does the access checking? Can't part of the ledger be unencrypted while other parts are not?

It might be wishful thinking. It's just an idea I have floating in my head, as an actually useful real world implementation for a blockchain.

I shared the link in another comment, but you might find it interesting as well: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14604582198663...

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