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Officials at Illinois Department of Innovation &
Technology (DoIT) think blockchain could fix
this. The state agency is experimenting with
a decentralized ledger technology that would
create a new identity model. Through this
network, DoIT will provide parents of Illinois
babies with a digital twin of their child’s birth
certificate.
So, how does this work? Government
agencies will verify the birth registration
information and then cryptographically sign
identity attributes such as legal name, date of
birth, gender, and blood type for each child.
Permission to view or share each of these
government-verified attributes will be stored
on a blockchain where an individual (or their
legal guardian in the case of a newborn child)
can fully control their verifiable digital identity
without depending on a centralized registry,
as one would with a driver’s license or
passport. Through this self-sovereign identity
(SSI) model, when patients go to a new
doctor, they can simply give the new medical
team a token to access all of their previous
health records.
“Blockchain-based solutions offer a new
way to enable patients to control their records
and put them in charge of releasing them to
others,” explains Andrew Tobin, the European
managing director at Evernym.
Evernym, a software company that
develops decentralized, self-sovereign
identity applications, is a founding member
of the Sovrin Network, the world’s first
self-sovereign identity network that enables
trusted interactions between individuals and
organizations. The technology powerhouse
also recently partnered with Illinois to
deliver a proof-of-concept for initiating this
blockchain-based identity model at birth.
“This will require interoperability of the
user’s identity across multiple locations with
user content and user control creating user
autonomy,” adds Sunil Thomas, Cluster CIO
for Business & Workforce at Illinois’ DoIT.
Evernym is not alone in its quest to make
records more accessible to the average
person. Several startups, such as Patientory,
Medicalchain, and SimplyVital Health
(which is HIPAA-compatible), are creating
blockchain-based solutions to securely store
health records and maintain a single version
of medical truth per patient.
“You will see many more important and
critical projects in the next two to three
years and how we scale and implement
these projects will be very critical to the
adoption of blockchain in the next five years,”
says Patientory founder and CEO Chrissa
McFarlane.
When these projects are expanded,
doctors, hospitals, telemedicine companies,
laboratories, pharmacists, and health insurers
can request permission to patient information
“Blockchain-based solutions offer a new way to
enable patients to control their records and put them
in charge of releasing them to others.”