If healthcare learns to share, blockchain could transform radiology

Imagine a patient calls an ambulance for chest pain and, on the way to the hospital, EMTs send their entire health record and vitals to the emergency department. When the patient arrives, clinicians have already reviewed their information. Such a world could dramatically improve care.

In Estonia, a small country in northern Europe, this is a reality, so explained Woojin Kim, MD, CMIO of Nuance Communications, during a presentations at last week’s Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) annual conference.

“Every patient, every person in that country has their medical record up in the cloud, and that scenario I just described actually exists, they’ve (Estonia) had...