A Concrete Way to Develop Clinical Research in a Fair Way to the Users/Patients Using Blockchain Technology

Author(s):  
João Fonseca-Gomes ◽  
Denise Francisco ◽  
João Mota Sequeira

Blockchain is being explored as a potential solution to many problems in areas other than the one created initially: cryptocurrency. Blockchain technology allows the authenticity of data, security in transactions, and privacy without the need for a third party. For that main reason, one of the growing interests concerns its application in healthcare, namely in clinical research. Multiple pain points of clinical research might benefit from the implementation of blockchain technology. This chapter shows some examples in which this technology is already implemented, identifying the advantages of its use. One of those advantages is clinical research, with the possibility of the patients managing their own clinical data and being properly rewarded for that. Research about clinical data monetization for patients is currently limited, and this chapter also proposes a hypothetical scenario of health data monetization workflow.

Author(s):  
Shaveta Malik ◽  
Archana Mire ◽  
Amit Kumar Tyagi ◽  
Arathi Boyanapalli

Clinical research comprises participation from patients. Often there are concerns of enrolment from patients. Hence, it has to face various challenges related to personal data, such as data sharing, privacy and reproducibility, etc. Patients and researchers need to track a set plan called study protocol. This protocol spans through various stages such as registration, collection and analysis of data, report generation, and finally, results in publication of findings. The Blockchain technology has emerged as one of the possible solutions to these challenges. It has a potential to address all the problem associated with clinical research. It provides the comfort for building transparent, secure services relying on trusted third party. This technology enables one to share the control of the data, security, and the parameters with a single patient or a group of patients or any other stakeholders of clinical trial. This chapter addresses the use of blockchain in execution of secure and trusted clinical trials.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (12) ◽  
pp. e0243043
Author(s):  
Shekha Chenthara ◽  
Khandakar Ahmed ◽  
Hua Wang ◽  
Frank Whittaker ◽  
Zhenxiang Chen

The privacy of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is facing a major hurdle with outsourcing private health data in the cloud as there exists danger of leaking health information to unauthorized parties. In fact, EHRs are stored on centralized databases that increases the security risk footprint and requires trust in a single authority which cannot effectively protect data from internal attacks. This research focuses on ensuring the patient privacy and data security while sharing the sensitive data across same or different organisations as well as healthcare providers in a distributed environment. This research develops a privacy-preserving framework viz Healthchain based on Blockchain technology that maintains security, privacy, scalability and integrity of the e-health data. The Blockchain is built on Hyperledger fabric, a permissioned distributed ledger solutions by using Hyperledger composer and stores EHRs by utilizing InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to build this healthchain framework. Moreover, the data stored in the IPFS is encrypted by using a unique cryptographic public key encryption algorithm to create a robust blockchain solution for electronic health data. The objective of the research is to provide a foundation for developing security solutions against cyber-attacks by exploiting the inherent features of the blockchain, and thus contribute to the robustness of healthcare information sharing environments. Through the results, the proposed model shows that the healthcare records are not traceable to unauthorized access as the model stores only the encrypted hash of the records that proves effectiveness in terms of data security, enhanced data privacy, improved data scalability, interoperability and data integrity while sharing and accessing medical records among stakeholders across the healthchain network.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maliha Sultana ◽  
Afrida Hossain ◽  
Fabiha Laila ◽  
Kazi Abu Taher ◽  
Muhammad Nazrul Islam

Abstract Background Data security has been a critical topic of research and discussion since the onset of data sharing in e-health systems. Although digitalization of data has increased efficiency and speed, it has also made data vulnerable to cyber attacks. Medical records in particular seem to be the regular victims of hackers. Several data breach incidents throughout history have warranted the invention of security measures against these threats. Although various security procedures like firewalls, virtual private networks, encryption, etc are present, a mix of these approaches are required for maximum security in medical image and data sharing. Methods Relatively new, blockchain has become an effective tool for safeguarding sensitive information. However, to ensure overall protection of medical data (images), security measures have to be taken at each step, from the beginning, during and even after transmission of medical images which is ensured by zero trust security model. In this research, a number of studies that deal with these two concepts were studied and a decentralized and trustless framework was proposed by combining these two concepts for secured medical data and image transfer and storage. Results Research output suggested blockchain technology ensures data integrity by maintaining an audit trail of every transaction while zero trust principles make sure the medical data is encrypted and only authenticated users and devices interact with the network. Thus the proposed model solves a lot of vulnerabilities related to data security. Conclusions A system to combat medical/health data vulnerabilities has been proposed. The system makes use of the immutability of blockchain, the additional security of zero trust principles, and the scalability of off chain data storage using Inter Planetary File Systems (IPFS). The adoption of this system suggests to enhance the security of medical or health data transmission.


Author(s):  
Tharuka Rupasinghe

IntroductionAcquiring healthcare data for secondary use should benefit from a transparent and highly auditable process when handling patient consent. In the current healthcare infrastructure, the healthcare providers hold the stewardship for the patient data, which includes an authority to determine the data access often without involving the respective patients. The current approach to obtaining patient consent as a one-off task is inadequate to facilitate continuous communication among the patients, healthcare providers and data requestors to manage more personalised data access. Objectives and ApproachThis study explores a novel dynamic patient consent mechanism based on blockchain technology and smart contracts. The aim is to enable patients to actively participate in this process by dynamically managing data consent preferences. Furthermore, it also explores the feasibility of implementing a transparent and auditable collaborative access control infrastructure for clinical data analytics, where all the stakeholders can be involved in determining access to health data. ResultsThe solution has been designed leveraging the blockchain and smart contracts to ensure auditability and transparency of the consent management process where a set of smart contracts controls access to data with minimum human-interferences. In addition, multiple design goals such as data security, privacy, interoperability, legal compliance and accessibility have also been considered when designing a prototype solution. An empirical evaluation is planned to obtain feedback from stakeholders involved in health data sharing for secondary use. Conclusion / ImplicationsThe contribution of this research study is to augment the existing data acquisition procedures for clinical data analytics using blockchain and smart contracts. The proposed novel approach aims to empower and enable patients to play a more active role in controlling access to their data for secondary use. The study will also illuminate the opportunities and challenges which blockchain-based technologies can address related to creating collaborative patient-centric healthcare.


Hyperledger Fabric refers to a blockchain technology regulated by the Linux Foundation, which implements a blockchain network, namely the permission blockchain. The network provides a membership service concept, which means that only certain parties can transact and access data. This research will show the blockchain architecture design of the hyperledger fabric, which is designed for the purchasing strategy of recycled waste products. The design will be used to make purchases for managing distributors in buying recycled waste products from waste banks as raw materials to be processed. The traditional purchasing process using the bank as a third party will take longer and will be more expensive. Therefore, this research aims to improve data security and transparency between the authorities and direct the payment process in an instant and dramatically reduce transaction costs. Besides, this design can also be applied to any e-commerce. The method used is blockchain, which focuses on hyperledger fabric design. The position on the hyperledger fabric is only applied to the transaction processing of the hyperledger fabric. This study's results apply a design to a blockchain system using a hyperledger fabric to overcome several technical problems related to blockchains such as throughput, scalability, and interoperability and contribute to purchasing strategies.


1993 ◽  
Vol 32 (05) ◽  
pp. 365-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Timmeis ◽  
J. H. van Bemmel ◽  
E. M. van Mulligen

AbstractResults are presented of the user evaluation of an integrated medical workstation for support of clinical research. Twenty-seven users were recruited from medical and scientific staff of the University Hospital Dijkzigt, the Faculty of Medicine of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and from other Dutch medical institutions; and all were given a written, self-contained tutorial. Subsequently, an experiment was done in which six clinical data analysis problems had to be solved and an evaluation form was filled out. The aim of this user evaluation was to obtain insight in the benefits of integration for support of clinical data analysis for clinicians and biomedical researchers. The problems were divided into two sets, with gradually more complex problems. In the first set users were guided in a stepwise fashion to solve the problems. In the second set each stepwise problem had an open counterpart. During the evaluation, the workstation continuously recorded the user’s actions. From these results significant differences became apparent between clinicians and non-clinicians for the correctness (means 54% and 81%, respectively, p = 0.04), completeness (means 64% and 88%, respectively, p = 0.01), and number of problems solved (means 67% and 90%, respectively, p = 0.02). These differences were absent for the stepwise problems. Physicians tend to skip more problems than biomedical researchers. No statistically significant differences were found between users with and without clinical data analysis experience, for correctness (means 74% and 72%, respectively, p = 0.95), and completeness (means 82% and 79%, respectively, p = 0.40). It appeared that various clinical research problems can be solved easily with support of the workstation; the results of this experiment can be used as guidance for the development of the successor of this prototype workstation and serve as a reference for the assessment of next versions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-22
Author(s):  
Ardian Thresnantia Atmaja

The key objectives of this paper is to propose a design implementation of blockchain based on smart contract which have potential to change international mobile roaming business model by eliminating third-party data clearing house (DCH). The analysis method used comparative analysis between current situation and target architecture of international mobile roaming business that commonly used by TOGAF Architecture Development Method. The purposed design of implementation has validated the business value by using Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculation. This paper applies the TOGAF approach in order to address architecture gap to evaluate by the enhancement capability that required from these three fundamental aspect which are Business, Technology and Information. With the blockchain smart contract solution able to eliminate the intermediaries Data Clearing House system, which impacted to the business model of international mobile roaming with no more intermediaries fee for call data record (CDR) processing and open up for online billing and settlement among parties. In conclusion the business value of blockchain implementation in the international mobile roaming has been measured using TCO comparison between current situation and target architecture that impacted cost reduction of operational platform is 19%. With this information and understanding the blockchain technology has significant benefit in the international mobile roaming business.


2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-400
Author(s):  
Pallavali Radha ◽  
G. Sireesha

The data distributors work is to give sensitive data to a set of presumably trusted third party agents.The data i.e., sent to these third parties are available on the unauthorized places like web and or some ones systems, due to data leakage. The distributor must know the way the data was leaked from one or more agents instead of as opposed to having been independently gathered by other means. Our new proposal on data allocation strategies will improve the probability of identifying leakages along with Security attacks typically result from unintended behaviors or invalid inputs.  Due to too many invalid inputs in the real world programs is labor intensive about security testing.The most desirable thing is to automate or partially automate security-testing process. In this paper we represented Predicate/ Transition nets approach for security tests automated generationby using formal threat models to detect the agents using allocation strategies without modifying the original data.The guilty agent is the one who leaks the distributed data. To detect guilty agents more effectively the idea is to distribute the data intelligently to agents based on sample data request and explicit data request. The fake object implementation algorithms will improve the distributor chance of detecting guilty agents.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 356-363
Author(s):  
Yuezhong Wu ◽  
Wei Chen ◽  
Shuhong Chen ◽  
Guojun Wang ◽  
Changyun Li

Background: Cloud storage is generally used to provide on-demand services with sufficient scalability in an efficient network environment, and various encryption algorithms are typically applied to protect the data in the cloud. However, it is non-trivial to obtain the original data after encryption and efficient methods are needed to access the original data. Methods: In this paper, we propose a new user-controlled and efficient encrypted data sharing model in cloud storage. It preprocesses user data to ensure the confidentiality and integrity based on triple encryption scheme of CP-ABE ciphertext access control mechanism and integrity verification. Moreover, it adopts secondary screening program to achieve efficient ciphertext retrieval by using distributed Lucene technology and fine-grained decision tree. In this way, when a trustworthy third party is introduced, the security and reliability of data sharing can be guaranteed. To provide data security and efficient retrieval, we also combine active user with active system. Results: Experimental results show that the proposed model can ensure data security in cloud storage services platform as well as enhance the operational performance of data sharing. Conclusion: The proposed security sharing mechanism works well in an actual cloud storage environment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 4011
Author(s):  
Dan Wang ◽  
Jindong Zhao ◽  
Chunxiao Mu

In the field of modern bidding, electronic bidding leads a new trend of development, convenience and efficiency and other significant advantages effectively promote the reform and innovation of China’s bidding field. Nowadays, most systems require a strong and trusted third party to guarantee the integrity and security of the system. However, with the development of blockchain technology and the rise of privacy protection, researchers has begun to emphasize the core concept of decentralization. This paper introduces a decentralized electronic bidding system based on blockchain and smart contract. The system uses blockchain to replace the traditional database and uses chaincode to process business logic. In data interaction, encryption techniques such as zero-knowledge proof based on graph isomorphism are used to improve privacy protection, which improves the anonymity of participants, the privacy of data transmission, and the traceability and verifiable of data. Compared with other electronic bidding systems, this system is more secure and efficient, and has the nature of anonymous operation, which fully protects the privacy information in the bidding process.


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