SBIR Phase II: Zero Trust Solution for Precision Medicine and Precision Health Data Exchanges

Award ID: 2226026

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project leverages novel converging technologies and expands blockchain technology to new healthcare domains enabling the secure exchange of confidential, precision health information such as advanced directives and life-sustaining management within and between organizations. The confidentiality, security, and efficiency of data management are critically important in advanced care and life-sustaining treatment decision pathways for ethical, clinical, regulatory, and legal reasons. The combination of the proprietary blockchain solution with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and edge computing enablement offers enhanced privacy and security, improved audit-readiness, better risk management, and superior operational efficiency. The solution functions as an overlay to legacy systems. It easily integrates with existing information management systems, in the cloud or on premise. Further, this solution is scalable, providing a competitive advantage and ease of adoption for stakeholders, including those who are seeking Web 3.0 upward compatibility. In addition to the direct impact within this application area, the technology can have a broader positive influence on the economy and society by preventing or reducing data breaches, increasing trust and quality of life, and reducing the total cost of healthcare. This SBIR Phase II project establishes a novel, efficient, and effective solution for advanced directives and life-sustaining management, which is one of the critical areas within precision health and medicine given the highly personalized and ethically-complex nature of the application. The zero-trust solution achieves decentralized confidentiality, fine-grained access control, and robust intrusion tolerance by avoiding any single point of failure and maintaining operational efficiency. By leveraging modern cryptographic protocols, pre-built privacy-preserving smart contracts, advanced user access control overlays, support for publish/subscribe messaging patterns, integration with off-chain operations, and confidentiality-preserving machine learning models, the solution offers a unique, modular, decentralized architecture that can meet complex regulatory, privacy and security requirements. Further, the technology is specifically designed to address Internet of Things (IoT) network security and data management at scale. The project aims to reduce cyber-vulnerability, increase operational flexibility and achieve scalability that will prove beneficial to a broad array of related healthcare and precision medicine domains such as transplant services, genomic medicine, or biobanks where data confidentiality is of critical importance, especially as these are highly vulnerable to data breaches and cyberattacks. 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: Peter Atherton