SBIR-STTR Award

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.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to provide the personal healthcare data needed to improve the patient?s outcome and experience]. Because healthcare data is protected, a secure way of sharing the right data, with the right people, at the right time is needed. Currently, attempts to harmonize data from many systems, and in many formats and sizes is very difficult and expensive and so such efforts are lacking. Advancing blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies for distributed data management and enabling radical data interoperability benefits patients and addresses a priority need in a $3.93 trillion healthcare market.This team develops the technology for a platform that secures data of any type from anywhere in immutable blockchains while respective data owners retain ownership and control to securely share just-needed data following their data governance criteria. Data is transformed and normalized into more granular blockchains and that can be combined for individual or aggregated population health modeling. Natural language processing is combined with a curated thesaurus to automatically create metadata tags for encrypted blockchains, facilitating data searches, discovery, and advanced analytics. Because healthcare data is complex and diverse, this project demonstrates, through priority use cases, how data needs to become interoperable. Such use cases include 1) sharing patient clinical data for participation in clinical research with consent; 2) creating a more complete patient healthcare record that spans many services or treatments; 3) bridging an operational gap between clinical data and claims; and 4) collaborating among research organizations in severe disease treatment. Additional technologies include instantiating a "datamart on demand" from blockchains for analytics, machine learning, and automating sharing of data, via smart contracts, capturing criteria, and like consent.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.