Blockchain-based security and infrastructure company Guardtime AS announced a partnership today with the government of Estonia and the Estonian e-Health Foundation to accelerate the development of blockchain-based technology for security, transparency and auditability. The company hopes to bring its Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) technology to all levels of Estonian government in cooperation with the Estonian Information Systems Authority (RIA).

Blockchains—with exemplars in the Bitcoin and Etherium chains–have a multitude of uses as auditable chains of provenance useful for providing transparency while maintaining security. A blockchain is a distributed, trustless ledger that can store the entire historical record of a document’s lifecycle–including submission, transmission, modification and termination—in such a way that only the private key holders (a government institution and the individual healthcare operators) could identify the individuals involved to audit that lifecycle.

Estonia already has deep roots with innovation and digital citizenship where a majority of Estonians carry a PKI card, which gives them access to over 1,000 electronic government services. As a result, every citizen has a broad digital governance footprint. This footprint places a heavy weight on government entities to maintain and secure citizen records.

This need is particularly strong for the security and integrity of healthcare records, which affect individual privacy as well as quality of life.

“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.”

Mike Gault Guardtime CEO, via YouTube

Starting in 2011, the Estonian government began cooperation with Guardtime to deploy KSI blockchain technology to secure documents in select government organizations. As part of this announcement the Estonian eHealth Foundation will integrate the KSI technology into its Oracle database engine, home to over a million healthcare records.

“Ensuring the integrity of information we process and store is critical to Estonia’s eGovernance and way of life,” said Taimar Peterkop, the Director General of Estonian Information Systems Authority. “You cannot make mistakes.”

The push for blockchain-technology and governance

Guardtime’s partnership with the Estonian government shows a growing move for governments looking at blockchain-technology to help provide auditability and integrity to document chains.

Although that interest and path has been somewhat rocky. In mid 2015, it looked as if Texas-based Factom Inc. might partner with the government of Honduras to secure real estate records; but by late 2015, it began to look as if the deal had stalled due to bureaucratic wrangling. U.S. states and governments have flirted with using blockchain technology; but in the end very little has come of this.

As part of its push towards gearing blockchain-based technology for enterprise and government infrastructure, Guardtime has also joined The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project. This open-source project brings together a host of blockchain industry leaders, fintech leaders as well as cloud and security companies including IBM, Intel and VMWare.

As 2016 continues to unfold, companies and minds gathering on the subject of blockchain and governance will most likely discover more opportunities to use it as a means to provide provenance for government services. Estonia’s partnership with Guardtime could become a bellwether for the industry as one of the first examples.

photo credit: Stethoscope And Electrocardiogram via photopin (license)