County looks to blockchain for records management
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Riverside County, California, wants to convert paper-centric services to trusted, secure and private electronic operations with an interagency blockchain platform that would be open to other counties.
Riverside County, California, is investigating using a blockchain to streamline records management tasks.
The county’s primary goal is to convert paper-centric services to trusted, secure and private electronic operations with an interagency blockchain platform. A blockchain-based solution would make it easier for customers to remotely order and receive copies of vital records, which they could verify on a public-facing website, the county said in a recent request for information.
For county staff, the solution would streamline the digital records verification process, improve compliance through automated validation, boost data security, cut costs and help eliminate paperwork.
Officials have two use cases in mind, according to the RFI. One would track and secure digital vital records and official copies of those documents. The other application uses blockchain to help store electronic documents, eliminating paper storage and increasing trust.
Rather than putting all the records and documents on the blockchain, the county proposes to use blockchain as an authentication layer separate from line-of-business applications, making the solution “scalable, accessible, and extendible to all aspects of county operations,” the RFI said. Only specifically defined metadata and the hash will reside on the blockchain, which then interfaces with county LOB systems. Security would be improved because the blockchain platform would eliminate the need to maintain a large pool of sensitive data that might attract hackers, according to the RFI.
County offices would access the blockchain through application programming interfaces. The solution would also allow the county to hold the rights to the ledger data, prevent other agencies from creating duplicative blockchain implementations and avoid vendor lock-in.
For vital records, the blockchain will act as a ledger for the electronic versions. Once a certified copy of a birth, death or marriage certificate, for example, is issued as a PDF, the blockchain will hash the PDF-certified copy and record only the document’s hash and defined metadata in the ledger. To validate the PDF as an “authentic” certified copy, users will access a web-based verification portal where they upload the PDF document. The PDF’s hash is compared to the hash stored in the blockchain, and if they match, the document is authenticated, and the result is displayed on the website.
For management of other electronic records, once the scanned documents are ingested into an agency’s line-of-business application, they would be hashed, and the hash stored on the blockchain along with the relevant metadata. PDFs of those documents would be authenticated through an API that compares the retrieved document’s hash with the hash originally entered on the blockchain.
In neither use case would the blockchain store any personal information from the actual record or document. The official digital record is stored and managed within a centralized trusted content management repository until it no longer needs to be retained. At that point, the record management system can delete the actual file.
Once the solutions are up and running, the county will determine best practices to safeguard the digital documents’ creation, revision, distribution and verification to mitigate fraud risks. It envisions other counties will want to take advantage of the solution, leveraging Riverside County’s contract.
“This solution aims to bypass the generation and/or storage of physical paper records and use technology to facilitate a fully digital-record process for fulfilling customer requests and electronic storage of electronic records while protecting the documents’ authenticity and verifiable origin,” the RFI said. “This digital government transformation will improve our service levels to the public while safeguarding the assets we are charged with protecting,” the county said.
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