The medical industry got a little more interesting today with the launch of a distributed ledger blockchain-based patient consent management platform for researchers from The Bitfury Group and health data company Longenesis.

This blockchain solution allows doctors and researchers to do a better job of tracking and managing user consent for individual studies and medical trials. The solution also takes into account patient privacy through the use of cryptographic security and autonomy by allowing users to withdraw consent at any time.

Current processes for medical consent are tedious, fastidious, opaque and difficult to navigate for both researchers and patients. In many cases, the bureaucracy makes it difficult for patients to withdraw consent for medical research and it’s become equally complex for organizations such as health agencies and research firms to manage consent.

Regulatory compliance is also extremely expensive and time consuming with the need to follow General Data Protection Regulation and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act regulations. These expenses arise not just from complying with rules and guidelines, but also providing open data for audits and failure to comply properly can trigger massive fines.

“[This project] will return control of the medical consent process to the patient,” said Valery Vavilov, chief executive of Bitfury. “This new blockchain solution will strengthen the process of collecting data and researching medical conditions, which could offer far-reaching benefits to people all over the world.”

The medical consent solution will use Bitfury’s enterprise-grade blockchain Exonum that includes cryptographic record security and immutable historical timestamps to support future audits. The blockchain can be built either as an add-on to an existing digital system for managing patient consent or as a full data-management system.

The solution is also fully compliant with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA and is designed to reduce unnecessary paperwork and time spent on administration.

“While the regulations vary from country to country, the research organizations should strive to deploy content management systems that protect the data owners far better than any regulation,” said Alex Zhavoronkov, chief executive of Insilico Medicine, Inc. “At the same time, the consent procedure should be pain-free, rapid, cost-effective and universal to ensure that the patients are fully protected and educated.”

With this solution developed by Bitfury and Longenesis, Zhavoronkov said, its comprehensive consent management system would go a long way to achieving that goal by helping ensure that medical organizations get explicit and irrefutable proof of consent that does not trap data providers with red tape.

Blockchain technology has come a long way for helping ensure the integrity of data in general and medical data is particularly sensitive due to its private and personal nature. Over the past few years, the technology has been explored to fill this role including a proof-of-concept for clinical data from the University of California at San Francisco and healthcare record management research between the Food and Drug Administration and IBM Corp.

Healthcare records blockchain company Health Wizz also developed a platform that allows patients to control their own medical data — allowing patients to choose which providers to share data with and control permission.

As for the solution from Longenesis, the company is already testing its service with several industry partners and has built the system to be applicable to a number of organizations including pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and clinics, genome sequencing companies and insurance companies.

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