Are You Seeing Any Initiatives By The Industry To Adopt The "Public" Blockchain For This And/Or Similar Purposes?

A | FOR THIS QUESTION, it seemed best to seek insight from someone who’s an expert in this area. The following is written by Munther Baara, head of new clinical paradigm at Pfizer.

Healthcare blockchain initiatives and consortiums are testing the implementation of permissioned blockchains, but I am not aware of any scaled public-blockchain implementation in healthcare. The sensitivity of clinical trial patient data, aggregated EMR data, and the extreme importance of data privacy may be best suited for permissioned blockchains.

Blockchain solutions can be an important enabler to clinical research; they can aggregate health data in a secure, trusted, and automated way. These solutions allow patients to more easily aggregate their data from different sources and share what they choose to with their physicians and researchers.

CRAIG LIPSET is head of clinical innovation within worldwide R&D at Pfizer.