Blockchain in Healthcare Today

Blockchain's Transformative Potential in Healthcare

2024-07-26T16:19:20-07:00

In Blockchain in Healthcare Today, the journal explores blockchain's transformative potential, its current applications, and the path forward for its integration into the healthcare ecosystem. The healthcare industry is currently facing significant challenges and opportunities after COVID-19. As we navigate the complexities of increasing healthcare costs and technological updates for better patient outcomes, innovative technologies are emerging as pivotal tools for healthcare transformation. Healthcare digital platforms have witnessed revolutionizing the dynamics of healthcare systems using disruptive technologies. However, while these technologies have garnered extensive attention for their transformative potential, there remains a critical gap in our understanding of the impact of digital technology on the healthcare industry. Population health management has critical challenges in data protection, sharing, and interoperability, where personalized medicines and wearable devices are highlighted as a concern. Patients and medical personnel need a safe and simple way to record, transmit, or access information through networks without fearing for their safety. Using blockchain technology can help address these problems (Haleem et al., 2021).

The European Digital Identity Wallet: A Healthcare Perspective

2024-08-12T15:41:42-07:00

Within the last five years, big strides have been made in Europe to write a future-proof rulebook on data and digital. In the shadow of headline-grabbing regulations such as the Digital Markets Act and the AI Act, the eIDAS regulation was revised to establish a European Digital Identity Wallet. Defiing a clear legal and technical framework will help create trust and credibility for the development and application of new use cases within healthcare, of which the patient will only stand to benefit.

Creating a Health Data Marketplace for the Digital Health Era

2024-08-13T14:57:18-07:00

The author posits that the establishment of a blockchain-based health data marketplace where EHR, IoMT, and wearable-derived data can be monetized by selling it to data consumers like medical professionals, researchers, regulators, third-party (e.g., AI service providers) and policymakers can solve this data centralization problem.

Model Complexity Reduction for ZKML Healthcare applications

2024-08-04T08:07:28-07:00

Abstract

Web 3.0 represents the next significant evolution of the internet that embodies the underlying decentralized network architectures, distributed ledgers, and advanced AI capabilities. Though the technologies are maturing rapidly, considerable barriers exist to high-scale adoption. The author discussed the barriers and the mitigations through specific technologies maturing to solve those issues. These include privacy-preserving technologies, off-chain and on-chain design optimizations, and the multi-dimensional approach needed in planning and adopting these technologies. As an extension, this paper discusses how one such enabler, ZKML, combines two streams of technology that are merging in unique ways to address problems in privacy and the cost of inference. The authors have conceptualized the technical and operational feasibility and implemented a reference healthcare implementation using the synthetic ICHOM in the evaluation phase in a global healthcare setting for high-volume data collection, including patient-reported outcomes. Model complexity reduction is researched and reported for the ICHOM diabetes dataset to advance the usage of ML models in global standards of healthcare data collection in network decentralized architectures for increased data protection and efficiencies.

My Holistic Data Share: A WEB3 Data Share Application: Extending Beyond Finance to Privacy-Protected Decentralized Share of Multi-Dimensional Data to Enhance Global Healthcare

2024-08-04T08:11:30-07:00

Abstract

WEB3.0 technologies on network architectures, distributed ledgers, and decentralized artificial intelligence represents a transformative shift in how data are handled, stored and shared. These innovations promise to significantly enhance consumer data privacy rights by addressing fundamental vulnerabilities associated with traditional centralized systems and self-custody wallets. Data breaches in traditional systems operated mainly by third parties are more common, resulting in significant data leaks because of centralized storage and excessive data movement, sometimes unnecessarily. Healthcare data breaches have been a growing concern globally. Several hospitals faced operational halts on account of the impact of ransomware on patient care and privacy. WEB3 Wallets are a vital component emerging as a significant force for global financial inclusion, especially in developing economies. They promote inclusion, reduce costs and empower individuals through self-custody. Though major improvements are needed in these wallets, their use is rising steadily. The global cryptocurrency user base is expected to reach over 500 million by 2025, with substantial growth in emerging markets, according to a report by Statista in 2023. This paper introduces a concept beyond cryptocurrencies and finance into everyday real-world use cases that need combinatorial access to a person’s holistic data, including financial and health records, genomic data, and advanced directives, among others, that need to be privacy protected and shared with specific actors identified for their roles in the WEB3 ecosystem through decentralized identifiers and non-fungible token badges identifying particular recipients. The author introduced the concept at ETHBoston in April 2024, won accolades for a primitive implementation using underlying threshold cryptography technologies, and enhanced it into a conceptual holistic data share application for global healthcare, as presented in this paper.

Soulbound Tokens: Enabler for Privacy-Aware and Decentralized Authentication Mechanism in Medical Data Storage

2024-08-09T14:00:23-07:00

Context: The digitalization of the healthcare sector faces significant challenges due to the diverse representation of data and their distribution across various hospitals. Moreover, security is a key concern as healthcare-related data are subject to the legal obligations of GDPR and similar data protection legislations. Standardization efforts like HL7 have been implemented to enhance data interoperability. However, authentication still remains a critical issue, even significant challenges.

Aim: This research aims to improve and strengthen the authentication process by introducing a novel architecture for decentralized authentication. Additionally, it proposes a new approach to decentralized data management, which is crucial for handling sensitive medical data efficiently.

Methodology: The proposed architecture adopts a user-centric approach, utilizing Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). It introduced a new non-fungible token (NFT) type called Soulbound token (SBT) in the medical context, which will facilitate user authentication across different hospitals, effectively creating a federation of interconnected institutions.

Results: The implementation of the proposed architecture demonstrated a significant reduction in authentication time across multiple hospitals. The use of SBT ensured secure and seamless user authentication, enhancing overall system interoperability and data security. The decentralized approach also mitigated the risks associated with centralized authentication servers.

Conclusion: The study successfully presents a novel decentralized authentication architecture for the healthcare domain, leveraging SSI and SBTs. This approach not only accelerates the authentication process but also enhances data security and interoperability among hospitals. Future research should explore the scalability of this architecture and its application in other sectors requiring stringent data security measures.

Creating a Health Data Marketplace for the Digital Health Era

2024-08-11T12:14:02-07:00

With the advent of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the EU and the development of technologies like blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT), it is now possible to create a new paradigm with a shared economic model where financial Incentivization will be the main driver for data sharing. This can be achieved by setting up a digital health data marketplace (DHDM).

Speakers on s podcast authored a paper in BTHY journal entitled “From Sharing to Selling: Challenges and Opportunities of Establishing a Digital Health Data Marketplace Using Blockchain Technologies,” https://doi.org/10.30953/bhty.v5.184

Their ongoing work is discussed for the DHDM operation outlined along with current developments and future work. Questions addressed are below:

What inspired the authors to explore the use of blockchain technology in healthcare data sharing and monetization?

What are the key challenges and opportunities identified in establishing a digital health data marketplace using blockchain technologies?

What are the potential socioeconomic impacts of a digital health data marketplace on patients, healthcare providers, and researchers, and how do you see the economics of health data developing into dynamic systems that will reflect in the processes of care delivery and management?

What are the next steps for the research? Are there ongoing projects or collaborations the audience can expect to be excited about?