Hashgraph is a new distributed ledger approach.
https://squawker.org/technology/blockchain-just-became-obsolete-the-future-is-hashgraph/
www.hashgraph.com is the site where the tech is based.
So while this is interesting tech, this article explains the similarities and differences to Blockchain. Biggest difference it appears is that while it works very well in a permissioned network (one where you know and trust all the nodes beforehand) in this it is likely to be as fast or faster than some Blockchain solutions.
Key risk and difference is using it in a public network (ie. public internet). Given it uses 2/3 majority and a gossip protocol it appears that bad actors could poison the ledger.
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Interesting to see how this stacks up against IOTA’s Tangle for decentralised IoT… either way, out of these infrastructure efforts there might be some interesting ways to manage health IoT devices and beacons in the public arena
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Spent some time talking about decentralised ledgers recently. Key benefits seem to be building trust and immutability. Can’t see a trust issue at the moment, but the immutability seems useful. With a trusted environment and the amount of data points we collect, it feels like a lot of effort to prove the data hasn’t been changed. So guess in the context of health information it still feels to me like a solution in search of a problem?
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Yeah, agreed. Problem driving the solution is essential. The trust and immutability benefits of blockchain or similar seem to be strongest in supply chain. Farm-gate-to-dinner-plate. Same trust in where your product came from would apply to big pharma. From one angle, patient journeys are a kind of supply chain. Patients trying to navigate through the multi-dimensional health sector and health professionals trying to discover/interpret the journey to make good decisions. National Patient Flow dataset is a great concept for working out what happened to patients through secondary healthcare (‘outcomes, planning, policy, funding’ value). An interesting partner to NPF would be the classic ‘electronic health record’ goal of a medical record that travels with the patient, accessible and update-able at the point of service (addressing a piece in the integrated care puzzle). The question of centralising or decentralising at that point might come down to the concept of personal information ownership (and sharing). Is the patient fine with someone else being custodian of their health data? Maybe. Does the patient want to update information on their own health encounters and general health? Some might (nutrition, exercise, experiences). On the flip side, relying on a decentralised (blockchain-like) EHR could mean governing bodies would have a hard time accessing the data for macro trends. But maybe this is solvable too. Not too sure of the implications of smart contracts for getting to multiple records…
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Where do you think this tech is on the hype cycle? https://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp
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Prefer to think of it in terms of the McKinsey three horizon model (see the methodology group for a conversation about that). In that context I think it sits in horizon 2 - essentially a space where it could underpin some radical/disruptive change but in recent conversations I have struggled to find great use cases in health as it currently stands.
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