Blockchain technology for improving clinical research quality

By Mehdi Benchoufi, Philippe Ravaud. Trials, 2017

303 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Reproducibility, data sharing, personal data privacy concerns and patient enrolment in clinical trials are huge medical challenges for contemporary clinical research. A new technology, Blockchain, may be a key to addressing these challenges and should draw the attention of the whole clinical research community.Blockchain brings the Internet to its definitive decentralisation goal. The core principle of Blockchain is that any service relying on trusted third parties can be built in a transparent, decentralised, secure “trustless” manner at the top of the Blockchain (in fact, there is trust, but it is hardcoded in the Blockchain protocol via a complex cryptographic algorithm). Therefore, users have a high degree of control over and autonomy and trust of the data and its integrity. Blockchain allows for reaching a substantial level of historicity and inviolability of data for the whole document flow in a clinical trial. Hence, it ensures traceability, prevents a posteriori reconstruction and allows for securely automating the clinical trial through what are called Smart Contracts. At the same time, the technology ensures fine-grained control of the data, its security and its shareable parameters, for a single patient or group of patients or clinical trial stakeholders.In this commentary article, we explore the core functionalities of Blockchain applied to clinical trials and we illustrate concretely its general principle in the context of consent to a trial protocol. Trying to figure out the potential impact of Blockchain implementations in the setting of clinical trials will shed new light on how modern clinical trial methods could evolve and benefit from Blockchain technologies in order to tackle the aforementioned challenges.

Subfields: Health Informatics, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/694f46db9868c345a2f450fe6d10d7131085f64c

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Citations in the corpus

Ethical and regulatory challenges of AI technologies in healthcare: A narrative review (2024, methodology): “Innovative technologies like blockchain are actively being utilized to expedite the consent process for clinical trials, potentially alleviating concerns related to personal data privacy associated with integrated service delivery [104].”
Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: A Systematic Review (2019, background): “Sustainable Cities and Society [34] Information [35] Neumann Colloquium (NC) [36] IST-Africa Conference [37,44] Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association [16] F1000Research [27,60] IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) [39] Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcom”
Blockchain in Industries: A Survey (2019, background): “Secure sharing of EMRs and related healthcare information can also facilitate fine grain analysis of patients’ data, medical innovations and research results in addition to data collected on treatments, diagnostics and related work securely and anonymously when necessary [102].”
A systematic literature review of blockchain-based applications: Current status, classification and open issues (2019, unknown): “…and the use of SCs could solve problems of scientific credibility of findings (missing data, endpoint switching, data dredging, and selective publication) in clinical trials (Nugent et al., 2016) as well as issues of patients’ informed consent (Benchoufi and Ravaud, 2017; Benchoufi et al., 2017).”