Mount Sinai Hospital to Explore Blockchain Applications

The New York-based medical school founded by Mount Sinai Hospital has launched a new research center focused on blockchain applications in healthcare.

On Tuesday, The Icahn School of Medicine said the Center for Biomedical Blockchain Research would be created inside the school's Institute for Next Generation Healthcare, which researches the application of artificial intelligence, robotics, genomic sequencing, sensors and wearable devices in medicine, New York-based news organization Crain's reported.

The center's staff will conduct academic research on blockchain in medicine, as well as create their own prototype networks. The possible use cases include drug development and preventing the sale of counterfeit drugs, clinical trials and a better research reproducibility, Healthcare IT News wrote.

The new center will be run by Joel Dudley, executive vice president of Precision Health at Mount Sinai and a former senior data scientist at Pivotal Software, which researches the use of artificial intelligence in biology. Dudley was previously involved in designing predictive models in healthcare.

His new focus will revolve around developing predictive health applications using the information from electronic health records, wearable devices and other digital sources.

The project began with bringing together a database of 144 companies that are working on blockchain projects related to healthcare. They include CoverUs, which works on allowing patients to get paid for their health data via a specialized exchange, and Embleema, which is designed to connect patient-generated health data and electronic medical records in a common secure repository.

The companies on the list have raised a combined $670 million through initial coin offerings, Crain's wrote.

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