In this article, three distinguished scientists (David Evans, Richard McDonald, and Terry Coatta) debate on the most recent and challenging approaches concerning healthcare records: ownership, privacy, security, and modern medical information systems.

In a professional but quite friendly discussion, the mentioned aspects are developed by Evans through a blockchain-based project developed by the HealthChain startup. In a question-answer approach, the three scientists consider aspects related to digital platform requirements, digital identity, standards and interoperability, software interfaces, access controls, and technologies like Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Composer (supporting the blockchain approach), CouchDB and MapReduce (for JavaScript Object Notation entities and distributed database implementation), and Kafka (supporting high-performance message streaming).

The final discussion takes into consideration the project development methodology. The platform development team follows a DevOps approach, which Evans briefly describes.

Being a discussion, the material does not contain bibliographic references; however, many concepts and technologies are explained.

I highly recommend the debate to all actors participating in the development of distributed and secure medical information systems.