Can NFT be used as a health wallet for data privacy? SingHealth reveals how

NFT may potentially help patients get full ownership of their data.

A team of innovators from SingHealth studies non-fungible tokens as a data management tool to address the data privacy gap and develop data exchange in the industry.

In a statement, SingHealth said their team found that similar to the process of cryptocurrencies, patients can own, store, and share their health data through NFTs with the use of a health wallet “hosted on a secure web-based or smartphone application, making this mode of data management easily accessible, yet secure and private.”

“The difference between commercial NFT marketplaces and a blockchain ledger dedicated to the exchange of health data is that the health data ledger can be programmed to disallow public viewing of its data,” read the statement.

“When a patient needs to share their health data with a healthcare provider, they can give the healthcare provider access to and allow them to view the required information,” it added.

Through this, it preserves patient privacy, only allowing data owners – the patients themselves – to permit the access and sharing of their personal health data.