The security of healthcare data is a major concern for anyone involved in this industry, and for the individuals who entrust their personal data to these organizations. Is blockchain the answer to security and confidentiality concerns in the healthcare industry?
Grapevine World is a decentralized ecosystem for the seamless exchange and utilization of health data in a standardized, secure manner. In collaboration with the University of Southampton and Tiani Spirit, a new blockchain-enabled platform using the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to track the provenance of healthcare data has been developed to break down data barriers and simplify the access and the ability to utilize health data for professionals.
The importance of medical data, its origins and quality have long been recognized in clinical research. Data provenance is the foundation of data quality, commonly implemented by automatically capturing the trace of data manipulation over space and time.
This pilot aims to demonstrate the value of combining market-proven interoperability standards in health data exchange (IHE) and blockchain technology (Hyperledger Fabric) for tracking and assessing health data provenance. The pilot will act as a trial run to assess the potential of the solution for clinical trial matching for one of Grapevine’s early adopters, a Forbes 100 pharmaceutical corporation (requesting to remain unnamed at the time of the announcement).
“Following a successful pilot execution with our early adopter, we are excited to receive strong interest from multiple health and life science organisations to subsequently adopt our solution. Benefiting from Microsoft’s global reach and strong support from the interoperability community, we meet a growing market need and will together overcome the current limitations for achieving a truly connected healthcare community,” highlights Wernhard Berger, Chief Business Development Officer and Co-Founder of Grapevine World.
The “clinical trial matching” use case serves only as an initial launching pad for Grapevine’s platform, which is designed to facilitate the consented data access for various types of organisations with a need for large-scale health data (universities, med- and biotech companies, etc.).
Powered by Azure, Grapevine can more easily overcome privacy, security, performance, and scalability challenges preventing many blockchain-based projects from reaching production stage, and limiting real-world adoption of the emergent technology in healthcare.
“Blockchain holds great potential for healthcare consortiums to collaborate to improve the quality of care, lower costs, and improve the experience of patients and healthcare workers. Powered by Microsoft Azure, Grapevine can overcome many of the challenges preventing many blockchain-based projects from reaching production stage, and limiting real-world adoption of this emergent technology in healthcare. Azure delivers industry-leading cloud-based security and compliance capabilities to empower healthcare consortiums to leverage blockchain to its full potential to help improve healthcare.” David Houlding CISSP CIPP, Principal Healthcare Lead, Microsoft Azure.
Source PR Newswire
