Applying Blockchain to Healthcare with Ethereum, Decentralized Identity and Peer-to-peer Databases

Researcher(s)

Chris Were, Dr. Ray Ng

Date of Talk

Bio

Chris Were is an Australian based technology entrepreneur who has led the development of a decentralised, peer-to-peer data storage framework with his company Verida. He previously co-founded Community Data Solutions, providing secure CRM solutions for not-for-profit organisations and government, growing the company to 150 customers across Australia.

Dr. Ray Ng, MD was born a polymath and entrepreneur: physician by day and avid technology entrepreneur, coder, and blockchain developer by night. MD with board certification and licensure in Canada and US. Ray now runs the COVID19 assessment site in Vancouver, Canada. In his most recent venture as co-founder at cybersecurity company Securable.io, Ray focused on assisting biotechnology, health informatics, and enterprise executives build and maintain strong security protocols while achieving the highest risk management levels. Securable.io was acquired in October 2017. After this sale, Ray returned to his roots on the West Coast of Canada to re-focus on his medical practice and study mindfulness, meditation, and other holistic forms of wellness that compliment his board certification in Integrative Medicine.

Information on Verida
Verida began as a research project in 2018, with the mission of helping people own and control their data. The team created architecture for decentralized control that could be used with traditional database technologies. The project evolved and an open source library was released that enabled any decentralized application to be built where users could own, control, and store their data using public encryption keys. Verida Vault was then launched with the goal of developing different web and mobile applications.

Abstract

Digital health information remains an untapped resource in the information age due to its inaccessibility and severe underutilization in today’s medical institutions. Decentralizing this data will be key to improving care and saving lives. There have been many technical challenges that have prevented the decentralization of health data in the past. However the emergence of blockchain, decentralized databases and decentralized identity standards mean the time is right now for this transition to commence. This talk includes a live demonstration of applying decentralized technology to unlock health data, allowing a patient to own their personal medical records. It will illustrate how this new decentralized future unlocks enormous efficiency gains across the whole health ecosystem. A walk through of the technology will provide an overview of how this can be achieved using public blockchains (such as Ethereum) and open source libraries to facilitate secure messaging, data sharing and encrypted data storage.

First Nations land acknowledegement

We acknowledge that the UBC Point Grey campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm.


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