Singapore has developed a blockchain-powered application touted to better manage and secure medical records. Enabling healthcare data to be stored in a digital wallet, the software has been used in a pilot in which COVID-19 discharge memos have been verified more than 1.5 million times.
Government-owned investment firm SGInnovate and local startup Accredify jointly developed the "digital health passport" to support the management of medical records. Work on the application had begun in May during the height of the global pandemic, when SGInnovate roped in Accredify on the project. The Singapore startup specialises in document lifecycle management products, including document management and verification.
Funded by the Ministry of Finance, SGInnovate focuses its investment on deep tech[1] startups that work on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum technology, and medical technology.
The newly developed digital health passport is touted to enable personal medical documents to be stored in a digital wallet, secured with blockchain technology, for easy access and verification. It also digitises medical documents for distribution such as COVID-19 discharge memos and swab results, helping to streamline the workflow of healthcare services providers.
This feature bypasses the need for paper-based documents, which are difficult to manage and easily replicated, lost, or misplaced, the organisations said in a joint statement Wednesday. The application is built on the OpenAttestation[2] platform, which was developed by the Singapore government's CIO office, GovTech, as an open source framework to notarise documents using blockchain.
"Digital Health Passport leverages blockchain technology to generate tamper-proof cryptographic protections for each medical document. Users can automatically verify the digital records via a mobile app and present it to officials via QR code, for a quick and seamless verification process," SGInnovate said. It added that blockchain-powered data storage allowed for greater transparency, security, and