SBIR Phase I: Blockchain-Enabled Clinical Registry Program

Award ID: 2036317

The broader impact and commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will develop novel cybersecurity for highly regulated industries and expand the applications of blockchain, focusing on enhancing and securing the exchange of medical data among different stakeholders. To date, medical consents can involve multiple parties: participant, medical center, physician, ethical review boards across various research institutions, and sponsors. Each group maintains independent systems, resulting in delays and potential for misuse of underlying clinical data. Additionally, minimal controls ensure the data input's completeness and accuracy, leading to lower confidence in and stagnation of the data and lost opportunity for real-world learning experiences. The proposed project proposes to establish a proof-of-concept decentralized, digital health data platform. It can be expanded to other highly regulated industries where it can improve the accuracy, confidentiality and security of data sets. This SBIR Phase I project will utilize blockchain immutability to provide an advanced electronic medical consenting service, ensuring the integrity of consenting transactions and a novel publish/subscribe and fine-grained, attribute-based access control to audit access to underlying datasets. Additionally, the project will employ novel approaches to encryption that can preserve the privacy of the transactions and messages that transit the system. The approach is built on emerging threshold cryptography standards, but proposes a novel vector-label-input threshold encryption. Today's labeled threshold encryption implementations only take a single string as a label, but a vector-label-input threshold encryption implementation will support a vector of strings as labels. This enables an innovative approach to fine-grained access control by allowing the system to check for any number of string-based attributes at the time the transactions are signed and committed into the ledger on the blockchain. To enable high-performance, total-order preserving data streams, the project will combine innovations in the publish/subscribe messaging pattern with state-of-practice blockchain technology platforms. 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.

NSF Program Director: Anna Brady-Estevez