Estonia is the first government in the world to have embraced the blockchain technology in its live production systems for ensuring the integrity of the records, logs and systems.

Guardtime, the platform that ensures integrity of data and systems at industrial scale, has recently announced a partnership with the Estonian eHealth Foundation to accelerate blockchain-based security, transparency, auditability and governance for the lifecycle management for patient healthcare records.

Estonia has been spearheading innovation in digital society for years now and is the only country where a majority of citizens carry a PKI smart card with access to over 1000 electronic government services. Electronic patient records are a crucial component of these services, and Guardtime's blockchain technology will enable an independent forensic-quality audit trail for the lifecycle of those records, making it impossible to tamper the information.

Guardtime will bring its Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) technology to all levels of Estonian eGovernment infrastructure through a new frame cooperation agreement with the Estonian Information Systems Authority (RIA). Under this agreement, RIA will make KSI blockchain available for all government authorities through the RIA-s X-road data exchange platform and increase investment in its existing blockchain competence center to better support public sector KSI implementations.

"Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves has repeatedly pointed out the biggest threat in cyberspace is integrity, and in particular the integrity of patient healthcare records," said Mike Gault, CEO of Guardtime. "This level of transparency and auditability is a global first and with healthcare fraud costing hundreds of billions of dollars every year, the Estonian model should provide a valuable template to dramatically reduce this fraud for the rest of the world."

The integration of Guardtime’s KSI blockchain into Estonian eHealth Foundation’s Oracle database engine will provide real-time visibility into the state of electronic systems and lifecycle management of patient records. KSI-instrumented records, based on hash function cryptography, will be mathematically irrefutable.

A formal cooperation between the Estonian government and Guardtime began in 2011, when select government organizations started deploying KSI blockchain to secure both public and internal records and logs to combat insider threat and indemnify the information systems operators.