HEALTH AND WELLNESS
The curriculum aims to advance the study of Blockchain technologies in creating innovative solutions to enhance trust between patients and healthcare facilities, as well as in the management of data sharing among them. As health-related data is sensitive, sharing health data requires adherence to numerous regulations and policies that can be defined at the European, national, or organizational level. In this context, Blockchain and Distributed Ledger technologies can provide reliable environments for monitoring compliance with these regulations and policies without requiring the establishment of a complex and often centralized authority to verify compliance.
In this curriculum, the adoption of these technologies will be studied considering the different types and formats of data involved in clinical processes and research experiments. The domain encompasses stream data, data-at-rest, images, genomic data, unstructured data, and approaches to decide between on-chain/off chain data management to balance the need for trust and system performance, which cannot be defined universally but depend on the type of data being considered. Additionally, the potential adoption of Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology will consider integration with established protocols (e.g., HL7 in its FHIR version and DICOM for diagnostic images) and common systems (e.g., PACS for image management and CRF for experiment setup). Specifically, the role of Blockchain in improving the management of genomic data, which involves handling significant artifacts, will be studied. Lastly, in conjunction with the essential role of the ethics committee in deliberating on the handling of personal data, smart contracts may be explored to implements policies in a more agile manner.
