health data Archives – Hyperledger Foundation

Mar 29

Hyperledger-Powered Solutions Helping to Reshape Healthcare

By Hyperledger Blog, Healthcare, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Firefly

For decades, the healthcare industry has faced the challenge of juggling a huge (and growing) amount of patient, payer, provider and pharmaceutical data with managing accuracy, access, security and privacy. There has been continuous innovation and investment aimed at breaking down information silos and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of data reporting and sharing. Hyperledger technologies power an increasing number of the solutions that are taking on these challenges head on and creating new models for the industry.

Read on for a sampling of these Hyperledger-powered solutions and the ways they are helping to streamline a range of critical healthcare processes. And join the conversation using #HyperledgerHealth on social channels.

Avaneer Network

Founded by a consortium that includes Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, Cleveland Clinic, HCSC, IBM, The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc., and Sentara Healthcare, Avaneer Health has built a private, secure, and trusted technical healthcare network where stakeholders can collaborate to streamline and improve the healthcare experience while increasing administrative efficiency. The Avaneer Network leverages Hyperledger Fabric-based blockchain technologies to ensure privacy, security and content-based use of data. Participants connecting to the Avaneer Network have access to a range of solutions for securely transacting and administering healthcare and deploy innovative solutions that streamline processes. The first network participants, all founding members of the consortium, represent 80 million covered lives and 14 million annual patient visits.

IBM Digital Health Pass

IBM Digital Health Pass, built on Hyperledger Fabric, offers a multi-credential verifier that organizations can use to manage and execute their verification policies for COVID-19 and vaccination status in a way that balances the privacy of the individual with the requirements set by the organization and local health authorities. With IBM Digital Health Pass, organizations can verify multiple types of COVID-19 health credentials, such as Good Health Pass, IBM Digital Health Pass, Smart Health Card and EU Digital COVID Certificate. Privacy is central to the solution, where the verifier application minimizes the personal data that is ever displayed to the user through the execution of business rules and it never lets any personal data leave, or be stored in, the verifier app.

KrypC Pharmaceutical Delivery Supply Chain Solution

KrypC’s pharmaceutical supply chain solution uses Hyperledger Fabric to connect pharmaceutical manufacturers and carriers to collaborate on the safe delivery of drugs. The solution focuses on end-to-end traceability to provide an audit trail for the efficacy of drugs by capturing and verifying information such as the manufacturing date, location in transit, and more. With multiple handoffs across handling agents across continents, there is a crucial need for trusted, end-to-end visibility of pharmaceutical shipments, conditions, and documents. With this solution, Kypc leverages blockchain’s inherent ability to trace drug provenance and create an immutable record of the lifecycle of a drug and how it was handled to address the challenges the pharmaceutical industry faces, both in sourcing and distributing drugs.

Synaptic Health Alliance Decentralized Provider Data Directory

The Synaptic Health Alliance is a coalition of healthcare leaders working to solve their industry’s toughest problems through blockchain technology. Their objective is to create a blockchain-powered platform that enables a culture of innovation, removes friction and solves the shared challenges impacting constituents across health care today.

For their first application, they tackled the challenge of providing healthcare organizations with accurate provider demographic data. Today, healthcare organizations typically collect provider demographic data in separate IT systems maintained by each organization independently. This promotes vast inefficiencies and duplication of efforts (costing roughly $2.1 billion across the industry), while also potentially reducing data quality.

To solve this, Synaptic created a blockchain-based Decentralized Provider Data Directory leveraging Kaleido and the capabilities of Hyperledger FireFly. Through the power of blockchain, participants are now able to crowdsource provider demographics. Token economics incentivize the creation of accurate data, which can then be used by other providers to update their own records, reducing duplication of effort, streamlining administration, and saving money.

Ongoing activity in the space is driven by the very active Hyperledger Healthcare Special Interest Group (SIG), which unites healthcare professionals and technologists from around the world in advancing the state of the healthcare industry through the implementation of technology solutions using blockchain technologies in general, and the umbrella of Hyperledger frameworks and toolsets in specific. It includes subgroups focused on patients, payers and healthcare interoperability.

Cover image: Pixabay

Mar 14

Love0

Interoperability in the Open Source community

By Tim Spring, Indicio Blog, Healthcare, Hyperledger Aries, Hyperledger Indy, Identity

Without interoperability, you wouldn’t be able to read this article. Websites, computers, and servers must be able to recognize and share information with each other, and shared standards and protocols allow them to do so, thereby giving us the web. On a smaller scale, companies have their own intranets, and, on the smallest scale, you might have your own private thumb drive for personal documents that can interact with whatever machines you typically work on.

Interoperability is not a technological given or an inexorable process. It is a choice that needs to be actively made, and it can sometimes take considerable effort to make work. Think of electronic health care records and the years it has taken to make it easier for a patient to access their health data, something originally provisioned in a 2000 Privacy Rule to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996.

Crises, however, can accelerate the slog to technological convergence—and that’s precisely what we’ve seen as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2021, a data-sharing provision of the 21st Century Cures Act came into effect: Patients must be able to have direct digital access to eight categories of clinical notes in an electronic health record, notably—given the need for COVID testing—lab test results.

Cometh the legislation, cometh the tech. Indicio and SITA had already been working on a decentralized, verifiable credential solution to integrate passenger health data with air travel in a privacy-preserving way. Built on Hyperledger Indy and Hyperledger Aries, the technology solved the problem of patient privacy by eliminating the need for a centralizing party to store patient data in order to facilitate verification.

With the Cures Act provision, there was now no obstacle to passengers in the US accessing their COVID test data directly from a Health Information Exchange in the form of a digital credential. They could use this credential to prove their test status without having to share personal information. In situations where it was important to know which test they had taken and when, they could choose to share this information with a verifier, such as the border control or health agency of the country they were visiting.

This solution is now known as the Cardea Project. Successfully trialed in Aruba, its codebase has been donated to Linux Foundation Public Health as an open source solution for sharing health data through verifiable digital credentials. It has an active community group, led by Indicio and Shatzkin Systems, that is working on expanding its features and, critically, its interoperability.

To do this, Cardea launched a hackathon for interoperability— dubbed an “Interop-a-thon”— in September 2021. The goal was to get companies using Aries agents to test those agents against a reference implementation of Cardea and each other. Over a half day, SITA, Liquid Avatar, IdRamp, GlobalID, Canadian Credentials Network, and Network Synergies all successfully interoperated. That’s the headline; the story, however, is that it took work to make this happen—it was an exercise in uncovering glitches, unexpected problems, and overcoming them. That’s what made the Interop-a-thon so valuable for all the participants—and that’s why Cardea is holding a second Interop-a-thon on March 17.

This time, in addition to agent testing, Cardea is going to field “out-of-band” invitations (a critical change coming to Hyperledger Aries at the end of March) and a simple reference implementation of machine readable governance (a way of adding governance rules at the agent level, thereby making governance portable and available offline).

Participants see interop-a-thons as a testing ground for interoperability, and therefore a way to ensure that the products and services they are building have the capacity to scale. This is a critical step toward achieving a network of networks effect. Not surprisingly, the number of participants signed up for the next Interop-a-thon is much greater than the first.

For Cardea, there are more and bigger trials on the way. And with each solution delivered, the scope for expansion becomes greater. If we can successfully implement a system for incorporating health data in travel, what about all the other clinical notes described by the Cures Act? What’s the roadmap to creating a decentralized health record?

This is the perfect challenge for an open source community to solve. And by testing the solution through an interop-a-thon, we can figure out how to make the many function as one.

If you want to learn about interoperability first hand, I highly encourage you to watch the video of their last Interopathon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVywPPLhG0U. For more details or to register for the next event on the 17th of March, go here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdpQmjxnYqohk0SfleulNOJXYsi1bhVhMjeGP5MxBMxCa-9TA/viewform