What You Should Know:
ConsenSys Health, a Las Vegas-based provider delivering next-generation infrastructure for healthcare and life sciences, today agreed to acquire FHIRBlocks, an innovative developer of advanced solutions to support self-sovereign patient-directed fine-grained sharing of their protected personal health information.
– The acquisition includes the transfer of FHIRBlocks’ technological and other IP, as well as key executives and staff, business activities, and relationships, to ConsenSys Health. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
– As part of the acquisition, FHIRBlocks Co-Founder and CEO Doug Bulleit will join ConsenSys Health as a senior member of management. A number of other FHIRBlocks business and technical staff will also be joining ConsenSys Health.
Impact of FHIR for Interoperability
Fine-grained consent management is a precursor to patients’ right to access and share their personal health information. To date, cumbersome, slow and error-prone manual processes have largely been used to administer such consents, but the introduction of digital communications using Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIRTM) for data interoperability has shown clear benefits and is now mandated by regulations, such as the U.S. 21st Century Cures Act. In addition, patient and consumer privacy regulations, such as HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA are also mandating new processes. FHIRBlocks was founded to enable the sharing of health information to achieve improved health outcomes while ensuring patient control and privacy are maintained.
ConsenSys Health Integration with FHIRBlocks
ConsenSys Health’s Elevated ComputeTM leverages converging technologies – blockchain, decentralized AI, and confidential computing – to move the space towards a new future of federated health data. The integration of Elevated Compute with technology components that underpin the FHIRBlocks Consent4HealthSM application will bolster the platform’s patient-centric privacy capabilities, allowing frictionless sharing of confidential healthcare data – empowering “liquid data” – between healthcare market participants.
Consent4Health allows patients to control the sharing of their personal health information, which is typically spread across several healthcare provider-managed EHR systems. The app leverages FHIRTM APIs and decentralized technology constructs, including self-sovereign identity built upon W3C verifiable credential formats. It is currently available as a service offering in Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace. Companion mobile wallets are available for download in the Apple AppStore and in Google Play.
“Fine-grained consents are a fundamental building block of numerous healthcare processes that Elevated Compute is addressing. This acquisition accelerates our time to market for a number of applications through the integration of best-of-breed technology. We are excited to welcome the FHIRBlocks team into the ConsenSys Health family,” said Heather Flannery, Founder and CEO of ConsenSys Health.
