7,964 research outputs found
Dwarna : a blockchain solution for dynamic consent in biobanking
Dynamic consent aims to empower research partners and facilitate active participation in the research process. Used within
the context of biobanking, it gives individuals access to information and control to determine how and where their
biospecimens and data should be used. We present Dwarna—a web portal for ‘dynamic consent’ that acts as a hub
connecting the different stakeholders of the Malta Biobank: biobank managers, researchers, research partners, and the
general public. The portal stores research partners’ consent in a blockchain to create an immutable audit trail of research
partners’ consent changes. Dwarna’s structure also presents a solution to the European Union’s General Data Protection
Regulation’s right to erasure—a right that is seemingly incompatible with the blockchain model. Dwarna’s transparent
structure increases trustworthiness in the biobanking process by giving research partners more control over which research
studies they participate in, by facilitating the withdrawal of consent and by making it possible to request that the biospecimen
and associated data are destroyed.peer-reviewe
Secure and Trustable Electronic Medical Records Sharing using Blockchain
Electronic medical records (EMRs) are critical, highly sensitive private
information in healthcare, and need to be frequently shared among peers.
Blockchain provides a shared, immutable and transparent history of all the
transactions to build applications with trust, accountability and transparency.
This provides a unique opportunity to develop a secure and trustable EMR data
management and sharing system using blockchain. In this paper, we present our
perspectives on blockchain based healthcare data management, in particular, for
EMR data sharing between healthcare providers and for research studies. We
propose a framework on managing and sharing EMR data for cancer patient care.
In collaboration with Stony Brook University Hospital, we implemented our
framework in a prototype that ensures privacy, security, availability, and
fine-grained access control over EMR data. The proposed work can significantly
reduce the turnaround time for EMR sharing, improve decision making for medical
care, and reduce the overall costComment: AMIA 2017 Annual Symposium Proceeding
A Blockchain-based Approach for Data Accountability and Provenance Tracking
The recent approval of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes
new data protection requirements on data controllers and processors with
respect to the processing of European Union (EU) residents' data. These
requirements consist of a single set of rules that have binding legal status
and should be enforced in all EU member states. In light of these requirements,
we propose in this paper the use of a blockchain-based approach to support data
accountability and provenance tracking. Our approach relies on the use of
publicly auditable contracts deployed in a blockchain that increase the
transparency with respect to the access and usage of data. We identify and
discuss three different models for our approach with different granularity and
scalability requirements where contracts can be used to encode data usage
policies and provenance tracking information in a privacy-friendly way. From
these three models we designed, implemented, and evaluated a model where
contracts are deployed by data subjects for each data controller, and a model
where subjects join contracts deployed by data controllers in case they accept
the data handling conditions. Our implementations show in practice the
feasibility and limitations of contracts for the purposes identified in this
paper
The Data Breach Dilemma: Proactive Solutions for Protecting Consumers’ Personal Information
Data breaches are an increasingly common part of consumers’ lives. No institution is immune to the possibility of an attack. Each breach inevitably risks the release of consumers’ personally identifiable information and the strong possibility of identity theft.
Unfortunately, current solutions for handling these incidents are woefully inadequate. Private litigation like consumer class actions and shareholder lawsuits each face substantive legal and procedural barriers. States have their own data security and breach notification laws, but there is currently no unifying piece of legislation or strong enforcement mechanism.
This Note argues that proactive solutions are required. First, a national data security law—setting minimum data security standards, regulating the use and storage of personal information, and expanding the enforcement role of the Federal Trade Commission—is imperative to protect consumers’ data. Second, a proactive solution requires reconsidering how to minimize the problem by going to its source: the collection of personally identifiable information in the first place. This Note suggests regulating companies’ collection of Social Security numbers, and, eventually, using a system based on distributed ledger technology to replace the ubiquity of Social Security numbers
Visions and Challenges in Managing and Preserving Data to Measure Quality of Life
Health-related data analysis plays an important role in self-knowledge,
disease prevention, diagnosis, and quality of life assessment. With the advent
of data-driven solutions, a myriad of apps and Internet of Things (IoT) devices
(wearables, home-medical sensors, etc) facilitates data collection and provide
cloud storage with a central administration. More recently, blockchain and
other distributed ledgers became available as alternative storage options based
on decentralised organisation systems. We bring attention to the human data
bleeding problem and argue that neither centralised nor decentralised system
organisations are a magic bullet for data-driven innovation if individual,
community and societal values are ignored. The motivation for this position
paper is to elaborate on strategies to protect privacy as well as to encourage
data sharing and support open data without requiring a complex access protocol
for researchers. Our main contribution is to outline the design of a
self-regulated Open Health Archive (OHA) system with focus on quality of life
(QoL) data.Comment: DSS 2018: Data-Driven Self-Regulating System
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