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Discussion on: Blockchain-Based Medical Records Storage.

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Rainyel Ramos

Hello Thorsten, sorry for the (very long) delay. You are partially right. Remember, I am Cuban and my use case applies to my country. You said that: "Health records are critical and their usage is highly restricted by law", that is true, in your country, in my country your medical record is the property of the hospital and the Ministry of Public Health (all the hospitals are property of the Ministry of Public Health), so, it does not matter if your medical record is in a "distributed network" owned by the Ministry of Public Health. Anyway, in capitalist countries many proposed solutions store medical records in the hospital database and only the hash is stored on the blockchain. I recommend to read: "MedRec: Using Blockchain for Medical Data
Access and Permission Management", "ClinicAppChain: A Low-Cost Blockchain Hyperledger Solution for Healthcare", "MedChain: Efficient Healthcare Data Sharing via Blockchain". Your healthcare system is very different from the cuban healthcare system. You have doubts about the encryption methods? You can use AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) for symmetric encryption or ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) with Secp256k1 curve (Bitcoin cipher) for asymmetric encryption, both algorithms have well-tested, public implementations. Implementing blockchain technology in the Cuban health system will help us to find out who modified a medical record, know the history of a medical record (all changes made), avoid data loss, etc., this will give us more control over medical records. Last, remember that this is my undergraduate thesis project :).