Epidemic Prevention Management Provides Opportunities For Blockchain Applications

4 min readMar 17, 2020

During the epidemic, blockchain technology is being used in more and more scenarios. The technology has greatly improved the epidemic prevention work and the management of civilian health data. A blockchain-based system in Shanghai has been implemented in Shanghai, which allows people to sign the letter of commitment regarding their health conditions during the epidemic prevention process without touch anything but their own phones. All they had to do is scan a QR code to access the letter of commitment and pressing “accept” on their phones, then the data of the visitors and their claims will be electronically signed and stored on blockchain. At the same time, these information are immutable and traceable at any time. This greatly facilitates the management of epidemic prevention, and reduces the risk of infection. The system can also be implemented at places with high personnel density and mobility, and by giving permission to access the data to the relevant parties, the supervision of epidemic prevention management can be done in real-time, and the data is true and transparent.

In addition to personnel information management, the charity platform that received much attention during the epidemic is also expected to rely on blockchain technology to solve trust issues. Charitable activities often involve multiple parties working together, they may include the donors, logistics companies, charities and the receivers. However, the participants may not form a relationship of complete trust, there had been cases where donations has been misplaced or misused, and has greatly hindered the reputation of charities in general, deterring people from making life-saving donations at critical times. With the blockchain technology, information such as donation instructions, fund flows, donation feedback, etc. can be put into the blockchain to make it easy for participants and other supervision departments to query and trace the donations, allowing transparency on the different stages of the donations. Every donation will be ensured to reach its destination and be used for its designated purpose.

The emergence of the epidemic also inspired the blockchain industry to constantly look for future possibilities in the medical sector. A blockchain project designed a prescription sharing blockchain and envisioned it to be applied to many medical scenarios such as hierarchical referrals and prescription transfers. When an outbreak occurs, such medical data sharing can greatly increase efficiency. The patient’s health data can be transferred from the smaller hospitals to the bigger hospitals through the blockchain. If a major illness occurs in the small hospital, the health data can be transferred to the big hospital for diagnosis, and under the government’s supervision, patients, hospitals, and pharmacies can use the electronic prescription sharing system to register, see a doctor, purchase medicine online and realize electronic payment for medical insurance on the platform. The system eliminates the data silos that exists between hospital, and greatly improves the treatments and the probability of recovery for the patients.

Before the Coronavirus outbreak, CyberVein had taken the opportunity provided by the federated learning technology and researched an application of federated learning and blockchain in the healthcare sector, specifically in the diagnosis of keratitis.

By using the data stored in the blockchain, the researchers were able to use federated learning to apply to data from the different hospitals into an algorithm model, constructing an algorithm that is able to diagnosis the different types of keratitis in patients, without compromising the privacy of the patients’ or hospitals’ data. Different types of keratitis caused by bacteria, fungi and virus have subtle visual differences between them, making it hard to diagnosis them correctly with the naked eye and determining the correct treatment plan for the patients. If there were major faults, the patients may become blind. The model that was tested achieved an diagnosis accuracy rate of 80%, which was better than 96% of the doctors that had volunteered to help in the experiment. This achievement can be improved further, but it also meant that such method can be applied in other aspects in the healthcare, supporting the doctors’ work and increasing the patients’ chance of recovery greatly.

Data sharing and information management technologies that comply with the users data privacy protection policies such as GDPR will certainly push the collaboration and development of many businesses in various sectors. The technologies has resolved the issue of users’ trust in data related organizations wanting to protect their personal data from misuse. Currently, not all organizations have adopted such technology, some user data will still be compromised…but in the future, this will most definitely become a standard for organizations involved sensitive data.

Epidemic Prevention Management Provides Opportunities For Blockchain Applications

Written by CyberVein

No responses yet