K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
Riverside County, Calif., is testing a proof-of-concept that uses blockchain to securely share digital official and vital records.
Currently, the county’s process is paper-based: Someone requests the record and the Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder Office makes a physical copy that it delivers either via mail or in person to customers who come into the office.
For the past six months, the office has worked with Infosys Public Services on a solution that would allow for a fully digital process. Through the web, customers can select the records they need, authenticate themselves, pay for the copies and digitally receive them within minutes through a government portal.
“We’re trying to become much more of a customer-centric organization,” said Peter Aldana, the county’s assessor-county clerk-recorder. “We felt like blockchain might be able to help us in particular areas of our processes, one of those being obtaining official and vital records,” he said. “Allowing our customers and citizens to do that digitally vs. the time and effort needed to do that in paper form would save citizens a lot of time and effort, as well as our own department.”
A crucial part of the effort is ensuring that the record has not been changed at any point along its journey from creation to delivery to a requester. That’s where blockchain comes in. It is a decentralized system of record, or ledger, that cryptographically stores every transaction happening in the network. As a result, data is encoded with an alphanumeric code, or hash.
The best way to maintain security speed processing and maintain trust “is not to take the whole record and store it on the blockchain, but take the hash that identifies a particular vital record and put that on the blockchain ledger,” Infosys President and CEO Eric Paternoster said. “Every time that the agency issues one of the vital records, a digital twin of that record in the form of another hash is stored on the blockchain ledger. And then only if the citizen wishes to share the record, which can be done as a PDF of a copy that they already had, with another agency for verification, then the entity will upload that document through a portal and then that portal will create a hashtag. The two hashes will only match if the record hasn’t been tampered with.”
Continue reading: https://gcn.com/articles/2021/09/03/blockchain-county-vital-records.aspx
Currently, the county’s process is paper-based: Someone requests the record and the Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder Office makes a physical copy that it delivers either via mail or in person to customers who come into the office.
For the past six months, the office has worked with Infosys Public Services on a solution that would allow for a fully digital process. Through the web, customers can select the records they need, authenticate themselves, pay for the copies and digitally receive them within minutes through a government portal.
“We’re trying to become much more of a customer-centric organization,” said Peter Aldana, the county’s assessor-county clerk-recorder. “We felt like blockchain might be able to help us in particular areas of our processes, one of those being obtaining official and vital records,” he said. “Allowing our customers and citizens to do that digitally vs. the time and effort needed to do that in paper form would save citizens a lot of time and effort, as well as our own department.”
A crucial part of the effort is ensuring that the record has not been changed at any point along its journey from creation to delivery to a requester. That’s where blockchain comes in. It is a decentralized system of record, or ledger, that cryptographically stores every transaction happening in the network. As a result, data is encoded with an alphanumeric code, or hash.
The best way to maintain security speed processing and maintain trust “is not to take the whole record and store it on the blockchain, but take the hash that identifies a particular vital record and put that on the blockchain ledger,” Infosys President and CEO Eric Paternoster said. “Every time that the agency issues one of the vital records, a digital twin of that record in the form of another hash is stored on the blockchain ledger. And then only if the citizen wishes to share the record, which can be done as a PDF of a copy that they already had, with another agency for verification, then the entity will upload that document through a portal and then that portal will create a hashtag. The two hashes will only match if the record hasn’t been tampered with.”
Continue reading: https://gcn.com/articles/2021/09/03/blockchain-county-vital-records.aspx
