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

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The broader impact /commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to improve health outcomes while managing costs. The proposed technology enables the integration and retrieval of data from many places and formats across a distributed ecosystem secured by blockchain. Healthcare, a $2.9 B market segment, is targeted because the need is great and the US healthcare market is highly fragmented. Making healthcare data faster to interoperate and share while maintaining data integrity, security and privacy is key to potentially improving healthcare outcomes. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is advancing foundational technology for searching and retrieving heterogeneous data secured in blockchain across a distributed data platform. Multiple data sources with different formats and data models will be transformed into more granular data blocks in blockchain. In addition to normalizing blockchain data into more granular data blocks for sharing and re-use in different applications (i.e., simplifying data integration and interoperability), research will use natural language processing (NLP) to assist in automatically generating metadata tags to facilitate searching across blockchains. To improve the accuracy of data returned in the search, a human expert-curated healthcare dictionary and thesaurus will be created and used in concert with NLP assistance. This combined approach should improve the accuracy of data retrieval by non-IT, healthcare, users across a secure, peer-to-peer data platform where data owners retain full ownership and control of their data. The proposed research will also validate through performance testing new blockchain search capabilies will meet the responsiveness and scale required by healthcare enterprises, a key need for commercialization. In particular, the project will establish benchmarks for speed and latency across a geographically dispersed network.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.