SBIR Phase II: A Platform for Health Care Data Integration Using Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to provide the personal healthcare data needed to improve the patient’s outcome and experience]. Because healthcare data is protected, a secure way of sharing the right data, with the right people, at the right time is needed. Currently, attempts to harmonize data from many systems, and in many formats and sizes is very difficult and expensive and so such efforts are lacking. Advancing blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies for distributed data management and enabling radical data interoperability benefits patients and addresses a priority need in a $3.93 trillion healthcare market. This team develops the technology for a platform that secures data of any type from anywhere in immutable blockchains while respective data owners retain ownership and control to securely share just-needed data following their data governance criteria. Data is transformed and normalized into more granular blockchains and that can be combined for individual or aggregated population health modeling. Natural language processing is combined with a curated thesaurus to automatically create metadata tags for encrypted blockchains, facilitating data searches, discovery, and advanced analytics. Because healthcare data is complex and diverse, this project demonstrates, through priority use cases, how data needs to become interoperable. Such use cases include 1) sharing patient clinical data for participation in clinical research with consent; 2) creating a more complete patient healthcare record that spans many services or treatments; 3) bridging an operational gap between clinical data and claims; and 4) collaborating among research organizations in severe disease treatment. Additional technologies include instantiating a "datamart on demand" from blockchains for analytics, machine learning, and automating sharing of data, via smart contracts, capturing criteria, and like consent. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.