Blockchain-enabled immutable, distributed, and highly available clinical research activity logging system for federated COVID-19 data analysis from multiple institutions

Abstract

Objective We aimed to develop a distributed, immutable, and highly available cross-cloud blockchain system to facilitate federated data analysis activities among multiple institutions. Materials and Methods We pre-processed 9,166 COVID-19 Structured Query Language (SQL) code, summary statistics, and user activity logs, from the GitHub repository of the Reliable Response Data Discovery for COVID-19 (R2D2) Consortium. The repository collected local summary statistics from participating institutions and aggregated the global result to a COVID-19-related clinical query, previously posted by clinicians on a website. We developed both on-chain and off-chain components to store/query these activity logs and their associated queries/results on a blockchain for immutability, transparency, and high availability of research communication. We measured run-time efficiency of contract deployment, network transactions, and confirmed the accuracy of recorded logs compared to a centralized baseline solution. Results The smart contract deployment took 4.5 seconds on average. The time to record an activity log on blockchain was slightly over 2 seconds, versus 5-9 seconds for baseline. For querying, each query took on average less than 0.4 seconds on blockchain, versus around 2.1 seconds for baseline. Discussion The low deployment, recording, and querying times confirm the feasibility of our cross-cloud, blockchain-based federated data analysis system. We have yet to evaluate the system on a larger network with multiple nodes per cloud, to consider how to accommodate a surge in activities, and to investigate methods to lower querying time as the blockchain grows. Conclusion Blockchain technology can be used to support federated data analysis among multiple institutions.

Variations in Electronic Health Record-Based Definitions of Diabetic Retinopathy Cohorts

“…77 Although there exist tools to aggregate disease phenotypes and other features to create cohort definitions and atlases, these tools are not used widely outside of the research sphere. 78 Although codified phenotypes to define type II diabetes mellitus 75 , 79 , 80 and coronavirus disease 81 , 82 exist, there is a need for more specific definitions in ophthalmology, for which many diseases are defined based on examination-based and image-based findings documented in the EHR, which were excluded from our study but would likely introduce even more variation. However, these data may be challenging to include due to variability in documentation and incompleteness.…”

The use of blockchain technology in medicine. Literature review and future perspectives

“…It is a software platform whose goal is to provide the pharmaceutical industry with an entire ecosystem to ensure data analytics functionality, sharing data from other research and ensuring an immutable audit trail based on blockchain technology. A different instance could be a blockchain system that operates across multiple clouds and is intended to make it easier for various institutions to engage in federated data analysis activities [24].…”

Editorial: Blockchain and distributed ledger technology—enabled architectures for improving healthcare

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Editorial on the Research Topic Blockchain and distributed ledger technology-enabled architectures for improving healthcareThe interest in blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) among health and healthcare research/practice communities has experienced rapid growth in recent years. These technologies are currently being explored in different parts of the world for a diverse array of topics (Zhang and Boulos, 2020;Kuo et al, 2021Kuo et al, , 2023Zhang and Kuo). These areas include but are not limited to securing patient/provider identities, establishing secure health data repositories, maintaining a single source of truth, overseeing pharmaceutical and medical device supply chains, detecting medical fraud, enabling secure medical data sharing among researchers, fostering collaborative data analysis, exploring research data monetization, crisis mapping and recovery scenarios, integrating blockchain-enabled augmented reality, facilitating research patient recruitment, and even tackling environmental plastic pollution with blockchain reward systems.

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