The healthcare system, a rich and complex ecosystem
Healthcare spans a complex ecosystem of private and public organizations, governmental bodies, communities, and people.
Today, hospitals and "in-networks", including affiliated hospitals, insurance companies, pharmacies, etc., store massive amounts of critical information related to the same patients in multiple places and systems, such as EMR or HR software. These databases need to be interconnected or updated frequently, which reduces their veracity and can lead to significant patient injury or considerable costs for the healthcare provider to correct and mitigate errors.
Health data is also stored in specific formats across multiple organizations. These formats are difficult to handle and require special health software. And the patients need to be in control over these health data because of the lack of portability and interoperability.
The future of healthcare involves verifiable digital identities
Given the impact and the amount of patient data exchanged in the healthcare sector, several pilot projects are being tested to replace the current paper-based and centralized identification systems with a more user-centric approach using Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) technology.
“Self-sovereign identity in healthcare refers to a system where patients control their personal health information (PHI) and can share it with healthcare providers on a need-to-know basis. This is opposed to the traditional model where healthcare providers hold and control access to patient PHI. Self-sovereign identity systems use blockchain technology to give patients a secure and verifiable digital identity, giving patients more control over their health.”
The future of healthcare will look very different from how it is provided, financed, and regulated today. These new SSI projects seek to test new ways of storing and exchanging information, providing more patient control, resulting in better patient care, fewer errors, improved safety and privacy, and reduced fraud and costs. The decentralization of data ownership and identity verification in the healthcare sector can help to build a healthy data-sharing ecosystem that improves research, healthcare systems, and treatment outcomes.
TRUSSIHEALTH | Next-Generation Internet
The Decentralized Trustworthy Health Information Exchange system that empowers doctors and patients.
TruSSIHealth tackles issues related to the exchange and storage of sensitive health data in HL7 FHIR format and proposes a decentralized, trustworthy health information exchange system that applies the self-sovereign identity (SSI) concepts, emphasizing on data portability and data interperability, to provide more control to patients over their personal and sensitive health information.
The credentialing processes in healthcare have been long overdue for change. Verification processes in this industry are plagued with inefficiencies due to paper-based licenses and certificates and manual verification processes and gatekeepers.
TruSSIHealth is working towards allowing users to store and exchange a copy of their health data and use it wherever they want in a privacy-preserving way. Decentralized identities remove the need to check and verify data with central authorities. Verifiable credentials (VCs) provide a digital trust layer to remove the ability to easily impersonate someone else.
TruSSIHealth is deploying the first decentralized solution that provides patients complete control of their information.
Patients will:
- Store personal and health-related information in a digital wallet installed on their phone and use it anytime, anywhere.
- Choose who can access the information and when to retrieve it.
- Instantly verify the integrity and provenance of the information stored in the wallet.
Healthcare and the big data industry will:
- Offer a service to convert the patient’s health data into verifiable credential data
- Enable health data portability
- Enhance health data privacy
- Build trust and data accuracy
- Offer more security for patients
- Make existing SSI technology scalable and interoperable
TruSSIHealth Project Key Drivers
Validated ID participated in the TruSSIHealth Project with their SSI-services VIDchain, including the identity wallet called VIDwallet.
It was determined to carry out a proof of concept to test the first decentralized solution to build an SSI-based health data system.
The objective of this pilot project was to prove the feasibility of importing, transforming, storing, and sharing patient health-related data using VIDchain and make it shareable with third parties safely and reliably, in compliance with the existing EU legal frameworks such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the eIDAS v2 by utilizing the eIDAS bridge.
According to these premises, it was necessary to implement a decentralized and self-managed digital identity model. During the proof of concept, Validated ID successfully claimed, held, and shared patient health records in a Verifiable Credential Scheme with VIDwallet.
ONTOCHAIN empowers Validated ID to build decentralized and trustworthy solutions
Under the European Commission Next Generation Internet initiative, ONTOCHAIN was launched in September 2020. The initiative provides funding to Validated ID for developing Blockchain-based knowledge management solutions that address the challenge of secure and transparent knowledge management and service interoperability on the Internet.
ONTOCHAIN empowers innovators to develop blockchain-based knowledge management solutions. Up to 4.2 million € funding, mentoring, and access to top infrastructure.
* This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 957338
VIDwallet, the future of digital identity verification
VIDwallet is an identity wallet built by Validated ID to implement the digital counterpart of a physical wallet. It facilitates the storing and protection of personal data (driving license, passport, vaccination credential, etc.) on the user’s smartphone.
VIDwallet acts ledger-agnostic, meaning it does not rely on a specific DLT (Distributed Ledger Technologies) or blockchain network. VIDwallet already supports several DLTs (Distributed Ledger Technologies) and blockchain networks, such as EBSI (European Blockchain Services Infrastructure), Ethereum, and Velocity, with and without a distributed network utilizing the DID (Decentralized Identifier) key method. Additionally, it does not only support EBSI identifiers but is also fully EBSI compliant with its services.
We help you design the perfect digital identity project for your company
If you are considering implementing a decentralized and self-managed digital identity model to allow your users and patients to share and manage data with complete privacy and autonomy. In that case, we have the experience and expertise you are looking for at Validated ID. Contact us.
