Trial is partnering with the Mayo Clinic for a blockchain clinical data project
Blockchain clinical data firm Triall has partnered with the Mayo Clinic for a study on pulmonary arterial hypertension. The trial of the company’s eClinical platform will include over 500 patients and ten research sites across the United States.
Triall described the collaboration as “an important next step toward leading a global transformation toward decentralized clinical research.” The goal is to collect data from various sources in the study and register the results in the chain as a demonstration of the Trial’s Verifiable Proof API and its role in creating verifiable medical traces that can be accessed in the future by regulators, investigators, monitors and other stakeholders.
Triall also launched the Ethereum-based token TRL in September 2021, following a crowdfunding campaign. TRL acts as a platform-based payment method for software and services within the Triall ecosystem.
The announcement highlights how useful blockchain technology can be in processing and timestamping immutable data records to benefit areas such as public health. While blockchains can preserve data integrity and automate the collection of data in one place from a variety of sources, some issues remain. Triall himself lists “scalability” as a potential problem for projects with extensive data records to process. There are also issues with costs (eg fees per transaction).
Triall doesn’t highlight exactly which blockchain it uses, although it does go into detail on its information pages about the benefits of using “blockchain technology” in general. These include the well-known advantages of immutability, decentralization, cryptographically protected security and lack of trust in trusted third parties.
However, it quotes Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin when describing decentralized architectures. Both FAQs and blog posts highlight the oft-repeated false energy consumption concern over Bitcoin’s proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm. Since the TRL token lives on the Ethereum network, the rest of Triall’s blockchain ecosystem will likely exist on Ethereum as well.
It mentions that data on Triall’s secure cloud is encrypted “using healthcare standard 256-bit SSL and 2048-bit RSA public keys,” with the data centers hosted in “SOC-certified and fully redundant AWS facilities” with primary servers hosted in the US and Europe.
“Contrary to popular belief, not all blockchains rely on highly energy-intensive consensus algorithms,” it said.
The BSV blockchain has proven for several years now that scalability can coexist with cost-effectiveness and that PoW is a far more solid economic model for blockchain processors to guarantee data integrity. Although much has been said about Proof-of-Work’s energy consumption, the truth is that a blockchain secured by PoW becomes more energy efficient with more users. Therefore, BSV has become not only one of the most scalable blockchain networks, but potentially the “greenest” of its kind.
All of these factors are important when considering personalized health care and clinical research data. It is a field where data integrity can literally be a matter of life and death – including data sources, record changes and future availability. For personal records, information must be both easily accessible and private, where patients retain ownership of their own personal records and have the right to allow/disallow access.
— Synerio (@HelloSynerio) March 22, 2022
The BSV project EHR Data (now known as Synerio) has been exploring various options for using blockchain technology in health records for several years now. President Steve Lawrence has said that “the BSV blockchain is critical because of the size of health data,” which includes six billion scripts last year in the US alone, and also when preserving patient data ownership and control.
With these examples, it’s easy to see why the blockchain scalability problem that Triall describes could be a core problem for that and other future projects. Data integrity means the ability to preserve records far into the future, something that becomes less possible in a chain with scalability issues or a fundamental protocol that is subject to change or contested parts—such as Ethereum.
See: CoinGeek Zurich Panel, Health Care & Blockchain: Empowering Patient Data
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