Clinical blockchain
Blockchain has been highly popularised by its core involvement in the cryptocurrency boom. Blockchain is a decentralised and secure method of storing and transferring data or information. The use of the technology outside of the finance sector and cryptocurrency is currently unpopular, but industry experts expect the technology to be fully embraced by other industries, including medical devices and healthcare. This will be driven by the uptake of blockchain in electronic medical records EMR and its integration into multiple facets of the medical device industry. It can also mitigate the risks of errors in patient records.
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Content:
- Blockchain: the future of medical device data security?
- How blockchain will revolutionize clinical trials
- Use Cases of Blockchain in Clinical Trials
- The potential of blockchain to disrupt clinical research data management and transparency
- Why wearables, health records and clinical trials need a blockchain injection
- Blockchain enables machine learning and AI to drive a hyper-efficient trial
- Blockchain in Clinical Trials
- Blockchain technology for improving clinical research quality
Blockchain: the future of medical device data security?
Pavel Novik, QA Unit Manager and the head of the Mobile Testing Center of Excellence at a1qa, explains how blockchain can ensure comprehensive protection of medical device data, the key target for cybercriminals in the healthcare industry.
With the ongoing advancement of the medical IoT, hospitals get equipped with more and more medical devices. They not only play a role in diagnosing, preventing, and curing diseases; they also continuously gather vital patient data and transmit it to clinical information systems.
On the one hand, this technology facilitates treatment and automates laborious data management workflows, but on the other, it came to be the most common target of cybercriminals. Typically, hackers are after protected health information — it is either sold on the black market or returned for a hefty ransom.
As a result, such breaches cost organisations insane amounts of money and a tarnished reputation. In a threat landscape where medical device data is the primary target, healthcare providers need to prioritise their protection to deliver safe and efficient treatment to their patients.
Blockchain is a revolutionary solution for IoMT security that forward-minded security leaders are actively exploring at the moment. Even the first tentative implementations show that the technology harbours the potential to elevate the security standards of a connected healthcare facility, blockchain app testers from a1qa admit.
Poor control over IoT endpoints and devices is perhaps the most persistent security challenge for corporate security leaders. Despite the proliferation of IT monitoring tech, companies with sprawling connected infrastructures still tend to let connected devices slip out of sight. In the meanwhile, a distributed blockchain-based database DB can enable complete visibility into medical IoT assets. As records in a distributed ledger are immutable, medical equipment gets implemented right into the network and can never slip off the radar due to negligence or oversight.
Also, all device configurations or physical relocations, including those conducted with malicious intent, will be automatically noted down in the history of changes, making it impossible for hackers to undermine security undetected in case they do gain access to the network. In addition to providing healthcare facilities with complete control over their distributed device network, blockchain-enabled monitoring promises to cut IoMT maintenance costs while elevating the network performance.
Today, many healthcare providers are abandoning their server-based medical data storage areas in favour of cloud-based solutions — and rightfully so. The cloud is a better option for many reasons: it has a nearly unlimited storage capacity, does not require meticulous maintenance, and is compliant with universal and regional standards of data protection.
Blockchain offers to step up the security of cloud-based health records storage spaces. In a blockchain-enabled cloud storage, medical device data is encrypted, divided into segments, which are interlinked with a hash function, and then distributed around the network in a decentralised way.
Such advanced provisions as hashed blocks and transaction ledgers ensure robust protection against various security exploits, while a verifiable blockchain architecture allows owners to track the storage history, which prevents data tampering.
What is more, in an unlikely event of hackers decrypting some data, they will end up with a small and disjointed segment of information, not an entire file. IoT-enabled healthcare facilities are oversaturated with big data that requires thorough management to prove valuable. However, since their data is typically distributed across various DBs and is neither consistent nor interoperable, organisations relying on the traditional approach often find it hard to manage this data efficiently.
Ineffective medical device data administration leads to low-quality treatment as well as threatens to dent corporate cybersecurity in the long run. Since both long-term and short-term outcomes are undesirable for any well-reputed healthcare institution, the owners should step up their data management game to forestall these risks. Blockchain-enabled platforms promise to meet data management requirements unique to the IoMT environment. Blockchain also provides for automatic and tamper-proof data provenance tracking, which is a must for productive and secure clinical trials.
Beyond this, the technology promises to render heterogeneous medical device data robust and reusable. Selective restriction of physical and digital access to data-generating connected devices is a common security technique at healthcare facilities. However, when it comes to an IoMT network, this practice fails to prove efficient.
The reason is that mainstream access technologies rest upon centralised models that do not allow for interoperability, which is needed to effectively manage the mobile, distributed, and dynamic IoT environment.
Also, a centralised system implies a unified access control policy and a single administrator to manage it all — the arrangement not only impractical but also rendering the entire network susceptible to attacks. Leveraging blockchain technology, medical facilities can build a more suitable decentralised architecture to manage roles and permissions in their geographically distributed IoT infrastructures.
In , the University Health Network Canada presented the result of their collaboration with IBM — a proof of concept of a health consent management blockchain. Another advantage of blockchain-enabled access controls is that once set, the policies are impossible to tamper with.
While each administrator is free to modify access controls in their area of responsibility, each change needs to be verified by other parties. Above all, blockchain is a way more scalable technology than traditional access management systems, which makes it a better fit for constantly expanding IoMT infrastructures. Contact Us.
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How blockchain will revolutionize clinical trials
Abstract:- Blockchain is probably one among the most important buzzwords in both finance and technology today, and has gained considerable attention, with an escalating interest during a large of various applications, like financial services, cyber security, IoT, and food science to healthcare industry. There has been an interesting interest witnessed in utilizing applications of blockchain for the delivery of safe and secure healthcare and data management. Also, blockchain is reforming the normal healthcare practices to a more reliable means, in terms of effective diagnosis and treatment through safe and secure data sharing. Within the long run, blockchain might be technology which will potentially help in personalized, authentic, and secure healthcare by merging the whole real- time clinical data of patients health and presenting it in an up- to-date secure healthcare setup. In this paper, we review the foremost important developments within the field of healthcare by implementing blockchain; we also mention the applications of blockchain, and discuss the challenges faced and future perspectives.
Use Cases of Blockchain in Clinical Trials
UC San Francisco researchers have created a proof-of-concept method for ensuring the integrity of clinical trials data with blockchain. The system creates an immutable audit trail that makes it easy to spot any tampering with results -- such as making the treatment look more effective or diminishing side effects. Blockchain technology utilizes an old computer science technique known as hashing, which creates a unique digital signature for each so-called block of data. The hashes accumulate sequentially, as new data is entered or changed, with each block depending on the last. The resulting "blockchain" creates an audit trail for regulators that is easy to decipher and validate, even without looking at the actual data. Daniel Wong, a PhD candidate in Biological and Medical Informatics at UCSF, built the system to operate through a web portal, so that each time new data is entered on a given trial participant, the sender, receiver, timestamp, and file attachment containing the data, along with the hash of the previous block of data pertaining to that patient, is recorded onto a new block, with its own distinct signature. Unlike the decentralized nature of most blockchain applications, this clinical trial prototype depends on having a regulator with centralized authority, such as the U.
The potential of blockchain to disrupt clinical research data management and transparency
Healthcare and Blockchain View all 5 Articles. The quality of clinical research is undermined by severe misconduct, error, and fraud, which are detrimental to the trust it should arouse. In this perspective article, we show how Blockchain may trace and control processes of clinical trials to prevent these issues or at least discourage them because they would become traceable and averted. Then, we propose a short and doable program in which, amid the complex stream of events in a clinical trial, we select sensitive and misconduct-prone steps that could greatly benefit from Blockchain by its simple core features such as traceability and incorruptibility of data registration or more refined automation tools called Smart Contracts. Trust is a pillar for societies.
Why wearables, health records and clinical trials need a blockchain injection
Published on 3. Authors of this article:. Background: In clinical genomics, sharing of rare genetic disease information between genetic databases and laboratories is essential to determine the pathogenic significance of variants to enable the diagnosis of rare genetic diseases. Significant concerns regarding data governance and security have reduced this sharing in practice. Blockchain could provide a secure method for sharing genomic data between involved parties and thus help overcome some of these issues.
Blockchain enables machine learning and AI to drive a hyper-efficient trial
TORONTO — The opportunity exists in healthcare to hand over control of medical records to patients who can choose not only what info providers can see but what personal data gets added to records via wearables, genomics and even lifestyle choices. And once patients begin accumulating more data about themselves in personal health records PHRs , they can opt to anonymize that information and sell it to researchers, vastly expanding the pool of information available for clinical studies. Because no data is as sensitive as a medical record, being able to assure its security and immutability through blockchain encryption represents a unique opportunity to "repatriate" and "monetize" that record for the patient, according to Dr. Hoskins moderated a panel on blockchain and the future of healthcare last week at the Blockchain Global Revolution Conference here. Electronic health records EHRs were supposed to create a longitudinal ledger — ensuring healthcare events are tracked in their correct chronological order and span a patient's continuum of diagnosis and treatment.
Blockchain in Clinical Trials
Trials volume 18 , Article number: Cite this article. Metrics details. Reproducibility, data sharing, personal data privacy concerns and patient enrolment in clinical trials are huge medical challenges for contemporary clinical research.
Blockchain technology for improving clinical research quality
RELATED VIDEO: Advantages of Blockchain Technology for HealthcareThe U. If that stat wasn't jarring enough, consider the industry continues to be plagued by skyrocketing hospital costs, inefficient practices and constant data breaches. These very expensive problems are spurring a drive for greater efficiency and innovation. With its ability to deflate the current spending bubble, protect patient data and improve overall experience, using blockchain in healthcare may help ease the pain. The technology is already being used to do everything from securely encrypt patient data to manage the outbreak of harmful diseases.
Try out PMC Labs and tell us what you think. Learn More. Patient recruitment for clinical trials is known to be a challenging aspect of clinical research. Conducting under-enrolled clinical trials affects the power of conclusive results or causes premature trial termination. The Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology originally applied in the financial sector. Its features as a peer-to-peer system with publicly audited transactions, data security, and patient privacy are a good fit for the needs of clinical trials recruitment. Given current recruitment challenges, we have proposed a blockchain model containing multiple trial-based contracts for trial management and patient engagement and a master smart contract for automated subject matching, patient recruitment, and trial-based contracts management.
Mayo Clinic inked a joint working agreement with Medicalchain, a British startup that uses blockchain technology to securely store patient medical records. Under the arrangement, experts from both organizations will work together to develop new ways to leverage blockchain to help improve patient care. Alebyatti said teams from Medicalchain and Mayo will work on several use cases using blockchain-based electronic health records EHRs. Blockchain has become a major buzzword in the technology world.
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