The Chamber of Digital Commerce has announced the first U.S. government-hosted developer contest that will focus on the use of open-source distributed ledger technology, or blockchain technology, in the healthcare industry.

The contest, called the “Blockchain in Healthcare Code-A-Thon,” is planned to take place March 14-15 and winners will be announced during the DC Blockchain Summit in Washington, D.C., that will be held March 15-16.

The event is co-hosted by the Chamber of Digital Commerce, a blockchain industry advocacy group, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

Perianne Boring, founder and president of the chamber, said the participation of the U.S. government highlights the future of blockchain technology and “the serious, long-term potential application of blockchain to the healthcare sector.”

This Code-a-Thon grows out of a challenge issued by the ONC in September, when the office announced the “Use of Blockchain in Health IT and Health-Related Research” and solicited white papers on the subject. Information gathered from that challenge was used to inform a gathering a month later called the “Use of Blockchain in Healthcare and Health-Related Research Workshop.”

The outcome of this workshop, which sought to brief healthcare industry stakeholders in blockchain technology, led to the belief in the need to support demonstrations, such as this Code-a-Thon, to better understand the technology and its role in healthcare.

Competitions such as these bring together developers from diverse backgrounds, potentially surfacing talent and innovative solutions for problems not yet tackled by new technologies.

Blockchain technology is particularly useful to the healthcare industry and governments for its use in securing and validating documents. Earlier this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioned IBM Corp. in a two-year collaboration to discover healthcare-uses for blockchain technology. In 2016, the government of Estonia partnered with Guardtime AS to secure more than 1 million medical records.

The contestants will use readily available open-source blockchain technology to address issues currently facing the healthcare industry. The three main focuses of the competition will be identity management and application programming interfaces, to build trustworthy and scalable systems; metadata tagging and policy expression, for managing access, security and auditing; and data aggregation and linkage, to assist with securely sharing patient data.

A maximum of 20 teams will be eligible to participate in the Code-a-Thon and teams can be consist of 2-5 contestants. Source code generated during the event will be available via public code repository GitHub and licensed under the MIT License. The registration period for the Code-a-Thon began Feb. and ends March 7. Further details are available on the Blockchain in Healthcare Code-a-Thon announcement page.

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