Start-up Medical Ledger at MEDICA: Blockchain-powered EHR and Secure Data Marketplace

MELBOURNE, Australia - Oct. 23, 2018 - PRLog -- The electronic health record (EHR) is the next vital step towards a digitalized healthcare system. However, many national healthcare landscapes still do not have a system in place that benefits from wide consensus. When implemented thoughtfully, an EHR promises both improved patient care and increased efficiency in healthcare institutions. The decision for implementation of any architecture and technology will necessarily be a compromise between information security and privacy on one hand and ubiquitous and easy data access on the other. As digital systems can never attain perfect safety and security, a solution to this problem should entail making unauthorized access as difficult as possible with tamper-proof and auditable incident protocols. Such a solution is Medical Ledger (www.medicalledger.io), currently under development by the Australian-German start-up of the same name. The company will present for the first time at MEDICA in Düsseldorf (Germany), the world's largest medical technology fair, from November 12 to 15 (Hall 15, Booth A23).

Secure storage of and reliable access to health data are not the only objective of Medical Ledger's platform. Patients will be able to provide their anonymized health data to institutional and industrial researchers on a secure and privacy-preserving marketplace and to profit financially from the inherent value of these data. In building its concept, Medical Ledger refers to a 2016 study of Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland e.V., which concluded that legal and illegal trade with health data is already taking place in many contexts, and that it is a logical consequence and long over-due, that data owners should be able to partake in these profits. This will be made possible on Medical Ledger's secure marketplace under strict safeguarding of data owners' privacy.

Medical Ledger's ecosystem is based on a combination of the Hyperledger blockchain framework, built by the Hyperledger Consortium with Ethereum. The Hyperledger Consortium aims to bring blockchain technology into productive use in various industries, such as healthcare. Leading members are IBM and the Linux Foundation; other notable members range from Accenture to SAP and from Deutsche Bank to Intel.

The second building block of the Medical Ledger ecosystem is Ethereum – after Bitcoin, the public blockchain technology with the longest track record. In Medical Ledger, Ethereum is the basis for the ERC-20-compatible MLG token, which will be used as an in-platform currency to pay participants for the provision of their anonymized health data on the secure marketplace.

These MLG tokens will be offered for sale on MEDICA Düsseldorf for the first time. The number of pre-sale participants is limited to 1000. Interested individuals will find further information on Medical Ledger's website, www.medicalledger.io, and in face-to-face meetings with the Medical Ledger team in Hall 15, Booth A23.