Report: Massachusetts General Hospital Targeting Various Blockchain Use Cases

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers are partnering with MediBloc, a Korean healthcare blockchain company, with the aim to improve patient data sharing and storing, according to an article in CoinDesk.

Per the article, the Laboratory of Medical Imaging and Computation by MGH and Harvard Medical School will be escalating research in a variety of broad areas “from medical image analysis to health information exchange by leveraging our cutting-edge technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and machine learning,” according to Synho Do who is the laboratory’s director.

Do specifically told CoinDesk, “In collaboration with MediBloc, we aim to explore potentials of blockchain technology to provide secure solutions for health information exchange, integrate healthcare AI applications into the day-to-day clinical workflow, and support [a] data sharing and labeling platform for machine learning model development.”

Interestingly, MGH won’t be using any real patient data for its research, but rather simulated data, according to officials, since the various institutions that have the real patient data keep it in a way “that can’t be shared securely and often is in various incompatible formats.”

MediBloc’s CEO noted that the company is not only developing a distributed ledger for storing and sharing medical data, but also working on a tool that would convert data now held by hospitals from existing formats to a universal one, per the article.

For this initiative, MediBloc has already gotten partners across Asia, including eight healthcare organizations and 14 technology companies, officials said.

Earlier this year, a testing environment version of the blockchain was launched, and the network is expected to go live before the end of the year before becoming fully functional in the second quarter of 2019. Furthermore, there are also apps in the works that are planning to go live next year, with one of them, currently in a beta testing phase, “designed for patients to sell the information about their symptoms and the prescriptions they get to MediBloc. After that MediBloc will analyze that data and sell the analysis to pharmaceutical and insurance companies,” according to the story.

In the end, the main goal of the blockchain project will be to let patients independently decide what to do with their information.