The Bitfury Group and health data company Longenesis, today announced the production launch of a blockchain-based consent management solution for doctors and patients that streamlines data collection for medical research.
The current medical data consent process is often fastidious, opaque and unmanageable. It is difficult for patients to offer or withdraw consent for medical research and it has become increasingly complex for organizations such as health agencies and research firms to manage user consent for ongoing and new research endeavors. These factors severely restrict the amount of data available for analysis, compromising progress for new treatments.
Compliance with GDPR and HIPAA regulations is also expensive and time-consuming for these organizations to manage. Penalties for non-compliance with user data preferences can be up to 20 million euro, or 4 percent of the organization’s annual revenue.
The new blockchain-based solution launched today by Longenesis and Bitfury makes it easy to track and manage user consent for individual studies and medical trials, while also making it easy for users to change or withdraw their consent for these studies at any time. All updates to user consent are recorded on an immutable, transparent Exonum blockchain with timestamping for future auditing.
This solution can be built either as an add-on to existing digital systems for storing user consent or can be deployed as a full data-management system. This solution is fully compliant with both HIPAA and GDPR regulations and helps reduce unnecessary paperwork and administration times.
“Bitfury is proud to work with Longenesis on this important project, which will return control of the medical consent process to the patient. This new blockchain solution will strengthen the process of collecting data and researching medical conditions, which could offer farreaching benefits to people all over the world.”
“While the regulations vary from country to country, the research organizations should strive to deploy content management systems that protect the data owners far better than any regulation,” he said. “At the same time, the consent procedure should be pain-free, rapid, cost-effective and universal to ensure that the patients are fully-protected and educated. Ideally, the patients and healthy volunteers should be able to profit from the proceeds resulting from products developed using their data. I salute Bitfury and Longenesis on launching a comprehensive content management solution utilizing the latest advances in the digital ledger technology.”
“Longenesis sees transparency as a cornerstone value in the future of life data exchange processes. Efficient and auditable consent management mechanism is key for ensuring legal soundness of any healthcare record-based transactions.”
Longenesis is already testing this service with several industry partners and has designed the system to be applicable to a number of organizations including pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and clinics, CROs, genome sequencing companies and insurance companies.