Roland Cabana (Vault), Brian Evans (Agile Digital), Elizabeth Vega (AIIA) and David Elliot (Agile Digital) celebrate the platform’s success in Melbourne. Photo: By Nish Photography.
An innovative Canberra-developed platform that uses blockchain technology to unlock the research potential of public health data without sacrificing patient privacy is now set to go global after winning a national award.
Local ACT tech companies Agile Digital and Vault Cloud have worked together with Canberra-based, Indigenous-owned ICT business Gulanga to build the “Secure Health Data Research & Analytics Platform” for the Department of Health.
Last week it received a Merit Award at the National Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) iAwards in Melbourne, the nation’s leading awards program for technology innovation, and will now be presented on the world stage in October at the Asia Pacific ICT Alliance (APICTA) awards in Guangzhou, China.
The platform team was crowned ACT state champions in May.
Agile Digital said Australian health records held enormous potential to support scientific research and help deliver public benefits through potential medical breakthroughs.
The Secure Health Data Research & Analytics Platform was created to address the long-term challenge of supporting scientific research on sensitive health data for public good, without breaching the privacy of Australian citizens.
Agile Digital Executive Director David Elliot said that at a time when Australians were more concerned than ever about their personal data, this was an innovation that Australian health consumers could really get behind.
“The platform enables Australia’s health researchers to continue to make meaningful advances to the realm of health science without risking the re-identification of patient data,” he said.
The platform was unique in the way in which data was transmitted to health researchers.
Instead of providing records directly, an environment is provided that allows researchers to investigate data for real insights but not directly access at a record level.
By automatically notarising all data science experiments on an indelible public blockchain, an indelible trail in support of both audit and scientific publishing is ensured.
The platform, in turn, provides researchers with easier access to more datasets – better equipping Australia’s health system to meet current and future health needs through the use of research and data to develop and implement evidence-based health policies.
The team will present the platform to a new panel of judges in Guangzhou.
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