I'm new to the concept of block chain and have only been reading about it the past four hours. I hear a lot of marketing and business folks tell me that block chain is the way of the future for data security in the healthcare sector, and since I'm interested in working the IT sector of healthcare in the future, I thought I'd read a bit about this.
From cursory reading I've done, I still don't see how block chain is inherently better at managing patient data privacy over more traditional approaches of silo-ed data management solutions.
For example, if a healthcare institution has one database storing all my information as a patient of their facility, at least I can hope they have taken the security measures to prevent other people from accessing my medical files.
When I did my cursory reading about block chain, it seems to advertise the benefits of immutability of the data, difficulty and validation associated with create new blocks of data through proof of work methodology, and the distributed nature of data storage. Blog articles speaking on cryptocurrency advertise how all financial transactions are transparent for all people in the block chain network to read. In the world of healthcare, I most certainly DO NOT want the entire world to read my medical history, but I don't see much laymen literature on how block chain addresses the issue of data privacy.
So my question is, does block chain technology inherently address data privacy in any way? Does it inherently perform better than traditional database management solutions in terms of data privacy? Especially in the space of health care where patient data must be private and accessible by only a few individuals.
