Equideum and Nokia Partner on Blockchain Marketplace Where Patients Sell Data for Research
Nokia has teamed up with blockchain provider Equideum Health to build a SaaS-based marketplace to sell patient information to researchers. The new Decentralized Equideum Exchange will become a blockchain-based service designed to allow patients to sell their personal data for research use by pharmaceutical and life sciences firms.
Patients who opt to share their data will be compensated through Equideum's Ethereum blockchain network with stablecoin or cryptocurrency backed by dollars. The platform is unique in that it allow patients to provide their data through a defined set of permissions and also enables them to set a time limit on how long that data can be used.
Equideum refers to its blockchain healthcare and research networks as "Data Integrity and Learning Networks." They include self-sovereign identity, fine-grained verifiable consents and privacy restrictions for both individual and enterprise data silos. Because of the massive security implications of sharing patient data, Equideum stores each patient's information separately on a peer-to-peer decentralized network.
The Decentralized Equideum Exchange uses Nokia NDM, running within a public-permissioned Ethereum blockchain architecture. Equideum also plans to use technology stacks including Intel's Xeon Ice Lake CPUs with SGX security features as well as Microsoft Azure.
“Currently, to shortlist patients for clinical trials, companies invest significant money and time in data acquisition, and face issues like poor data quality, compliance, and cost of intermediaries,” said Nokia in a statement about its work with Equideum.
The Equideum SaaS solution will act as a multi-party ecosystem, enabling research companies performing clinical trials to connect with the patient data relevant to their specific studies. The data marketplace will be able to securely process, enrich, assemble and analyze data using blockchain along with decentralized AI and privacy-preserving technologies.
Patients will also have a number of ways to sell their data, including through healthcare providers and insurance providers who participate in Equideum Health's existing data integrity and learning networks.
“Then there’s also our straight, direct-to-consumer application where patients may learn about us a number of ways and be activated directly into our offering,” said Sean Manion, chief scientific officer at Equideum Health.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
