Brains in a Bar: Data Sharing Challenges in Healthcare
For the Virus Tracking edition of Brains in a Bar, we invited four Tech Square ATL (TSQATL) Social Club members to discuss security and efficiency issues in the process of sharing medical data.
Over a few drinks at a secret location that evening, we discussed the importance of being able to track reported data sources, and whether blockchain as a solution could speed up this process and make it more secure.
Across the board, there was an agreement that companies providing medical virus-related data to the world can and should provide more application programming interfaces (APIs) that are easy to access.
“We need better quality APIs from the data sources. It would make it easier for multiple people to present the information.”
Crowd-sourcing the communication and analysis of the data could also be an enormous advantage when it comes to its trustworthiness.
“If [the data] somehow were stripped of personal and sensitive information, it should be made easy to get and fully transparent. The more transparent, the lower the likelihood for a competitive source of data.”
But blockchain, while being very transparent of data transfer and transactions, can be relatively slow to get each transaction authorized and approved. This slow speed could be a problem for the medical industry when considering the use of blockchain.
“Blockchain is, unfortunately, relatively slow. The speed of it would be a factor to think about when creating a virus record system.”
DID YOU KNOW?
According to Statista, the average confirmation time for a Bitcoin transaction was 9.6 minutes in May 2020.
What are your thoughts on ways medical companies can make the sharing of data more efficient and secure? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Brains in a Bar is an invite-only gathering where community members come together over cocktails to deliberate on a brainy topic at a secret location. The best part? The first drink’s on us — if, and only if, you solve a series of puzzles. Look out for the next one here soon.