MedChain, an early-stage company building globally compliant healthcare blockchain and decentralized applications (dApps) for electronic medical records (EMRs), has announced it is teaming up with IBM Business Partner Cognition Foundry to capitalize on the advanced data protection and high performance of IBM LinuxONE, the enterprise Linux server built on mainframe technology.
The server, coupled with blockchain is designed to enhance MedChain solutions that address important challenges in healthcare. Since 2017, MedChain has been giving patients control of their own health information and the ability to delegate access to providers like doctors and hospitals using a blockchain and distributed storage solution for EMR and electronic protected health information (ePHI).
The MedChain Network is an extensible, layered architecture and protocol system governed and secured by multiple blockchains that utilize a multi-crypto-token framework.
“As a service provider, IBM LinuxONE allows us to quickly set up a complete IT infrastructure capable of supporting millions of transactions for clients like MedChain. LinuxONE supports pervasive encryption of data and workload isolation, enabling advanced protection against external and internal threats for sensitive data and applications’
This network is built upon the Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain, an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation and built to run on LinuxONE. The MedChain solution is a “common data-layer” that allows existing EMR companies to build compliant healthcare dApps, empowering clients with unprecedented levels of control and insight into their own information.
Cognition Foundry is a service provider that enables visionaries to use extreme computing power for the good of society. As they “democratize access to enterprise IT”, they offer the LinuxONE platform to MedChain developers, creating a blockchain and analytics solution that can quickly scale to support millions of transactions. Similar capabilities have previously only been available to corporations and government agencies.
“Incorporating Cognition Foundry’s IBM LinuxONE environment into the MedChain architecture, allows a fantastic opportunity to exponentially grow Phase II of our network on top of the Phase I work of storing and managing EMR. Phase II is the data-intensive AI and deep learning involved with analyzing all that data. Building on top of the existing MedChain permission structure, only the patient can authorize their data to be used in research. Over the years, this opt-in process will yield petabytes of full lifetimes of contiguous data. The effect of having each patient’s data accessible by all care providers means new discoveries can be made based on the ‘holistic’ view of each and every procedure or medication taken.”
Working together, Cognition Foundry and MedChain underpinned by IBM LinuxONE will help patients control their data and help researchers discover new treatments and cures for the benefit of everyone.