Design and development of blockchain-based systems in healthcare

Context

Currently, in the German healthcare system, patient-related data is collected by different actors independently of each other (e.g., at the specialist, general practitioner, outpatient care, etc.). Merging the data collected at different medical institutions and from the patient himself into a holistic health profile can provide the basis for personalized treatment and support services and data trust systems and thus also improve the medical care of those patients, e.g., by providing early feedback on the effectiveness of a treatment or medication to the treating physician. Distributed ledger technologies (DLT) have enormous potential for this due to their tamper-resistance, transparency and non-repudiation. Also with regard to self-sovereign approaches to data management based on the Blockchain (e.g. Self-Sovereign Identity), an enormous added value is seen in this technology. The aim of this call is to open up this topic area in an application scenario and to develop technical solutions (e.g., decentralized storage approaches and access management, self-sovereign identity solutions).

Tasks

• Research in the field of DLT-based solutions
• Identification of meaningful use cases (e.g., oncology, sleep medicine)
• Consideration of identity, data, process and access rights management required
• Conception of a technical solution and prototypical implementation
• Evaluation of this prototype with real use cases
• Improve and further develop existing prototypes using appropriate methods (e.g. federated machine learning, data science, data modeling, cybersecurity, sensor fusion).

Requirements

• Independent thinking and working
• High level of self-motivation and commitment
• Studies with technical and/or scientific relation
• Interest in blockchain topics and possibly initial experience with Hyperledger Fabric, Indy and Aries, Ethereum or other DLT frameworks
• Ideally practical experience with web technologies and programming languages (JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C, Python, etc.)