By Sharon Ambata-Villanueva  and Laren Helfer

Health information management is an important consideration in the delivery of healthcare. Given that we (as partners in this activity) both work with health information systems in our professional lives, we identified a mutual interest in the impact that blockchain technology is, or could be having on health information management. Though we both work with and educate others about digital information systems, we both initially perceived the concept of blockchain to be somewhat elusive, and a topic that we would like to further explore.

Upon beginning our research, Google offered us several hits on blockchain, and how it originated in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Wikipedia provided a description and several accounts of blockchain’s history and applications, and Youtube offered us a simplistic and clear explanation about what blockchain technology actually is. From there, we moved into investigating the relevance of blockchain in healthcare by way of conducting research through scholarly literature. The abundance of information we encountered included scholarly articles, medical journals and what we perceived as vendors selling their blockchain related products (Medrec: Using blockchain, IBM.com blockchain, CBinsights report on blockchain).  We were impressed at how the simple action of conducting an internet search resulted in such a deluge of content. While we appreciated the relative accessibility of the content, we were cautious about accepting what we were actually reading. How can one discern between what constitutes credible research and what amounts to vendors who are trying to entice you to buy their products?

In the articles available, themes of interoperability among existing EMR systems, and decentralization of health information management kept recurring. Proponents of blockchain assert that confidentiality, data accuracy and authenticity can be maintained without the bureaucracy and limitations of existing data management software. However, we agreed in our discussion that many of the advantages that blockchain technology can afford, are already realized in other forms of electronic data management. Due to the background of our team, we were able to critically assess the context of the claims being made in some of the articles, while also being aware that someone who did not share our same frame of reference might not have been able to do so.

Given the abundance of information, and how overwhelming and time consuming it was for us to sift through the data, it seems we might have wanted to either start with a more basic topic (such as what is blockchain?) or we might have chosen to focus on only the application of blockchain in health-care, and accepted a certain level of ignorance about the mechanism of the technology itself. Either way, we have learned that the focus of the search seems to be vital in being able to filter erroneous information. As Weller (2011) asserted in his article, content is plenty, but time and attention span are limited. This limited time and attention could pose a challenge to learners and educators. Our impression is that content curation is becoming more critical in today’s digital age and that there is indeed the value of the teacher in teacher-student-content relationships.