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https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1810/EuroPro_paper_04.pdf
MHMD: My Health, My Data
Edwin Morley-Fletcher
Lynkeus
Rome, Italy
emf@lynkeus.com
ABSTRACT MHMD develops new mechanisms of trust and of direct, value-
MHMD1 is an EU-funded project poised to create the first open based relationships between people, hospitals, research centres,
biomedical information network centred on the connection and businesses, by making use, for the very first time in
between organisations and the individual, aiming at encouraging healthcare, of a blockchain system, i.e. a digital ledger where
hospitals to start making anonymised data available for open information relating to the distributed storage of the health data is
research, while prompting citizens to become the ultimate owners trimmed in hash-based language code, making it possible to
and controllers of their health data. describe exactly what type of data are available, referring to what
cohorts of patients, and data transactions are continuously
validated to the entire network of stakeholders, avoiding any
Keywords possibility of fraudulent usage.
Blockchain, Smart Contracts, Anonymisation, Pseudonymisation,
Personal Data Accounts, Privacy bt design, Differential Privacy, A dynamic consent interface will allow users to grant, deny and
Homomorphic Encription, Secure Multiparty Computation, revoke data access for different uses according to their
Analytics. preferences through personal data accounts, storage clouds
enabling individual access from any personal device. In this way,
patients will be able to fully leverage the value of their clinical
1. INTRODUCTION – CHALLENGES information, turning to different healthcare professionals for
Issues of data subjects’ privacy and data security represent a second opinion, or searching for profiles of similar patients and
crucial challenge in the biomedical sector more than in other contact them upon their permission. Physicians, in turn, will have
industries. The current IT landscape in this field shows a myriad the possibility to retrieve medical annotations or execute queries
of isolated, locally hosted patient data repositories, managed by to identify patients with analogous features to find cues about a
clinical centres and other organisations, which are subject to specific clinical case.
frequent and massive data breaches. Patients are disenfranchised
in this process, and are not able to have a clear understanding of 3. VALIDATION & EVALUATION
who uses their personal information and for what purposes. This Smart contracts, self-executing contractual states in digital form,
makes it the ideal field to build and test new models of privacy will regulate data transactions between users, allowing the
and data protection, and the technologies that encode them. permission to access, and stakeholders, who will be enabled to
MHMD aims at changing the existing scenario by introducing a make direct requests and offer incentives in exchange of access
distributed, peer-to-peer architecture, based on Blockchain and rights. This system will be checking its applicability as an
Personal Data Accounts. operational Infostructure, and will represent an innovative
challenge within the EU General Data Protection Regulation
2. OVERALL CONCEPT entering in force in 2018. On this basis, MHMD has the ambition
MHMD profiles and classifies sensitive data based on their to foster the development of a true information marketplace for
informational and economic value, and assesses the most suitable healthcare.
and robust de-identification and encryption technologies needed MHMD will also analyse users’ behavioural patterns alongside
to secure different types of information, while still allowing ethical and cultural orientations, to identify hidden dynamics in
advanced knowledge discovery through analytics and deep the interactions between humans and complex information
learning applications running on a growing amount of services, and will assess the overall security of its multi-modular
anonymised or pseudonymised data. architecture by testing it through dedicated self-hacking
simulations and public hacking challenges, performed on
synthetic data sets.
1
MHMD has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 732907;
4. CONCLUDING REMARKS
Project Coordinator: Prof. Edwin Morley-Fletcher, Lynkeus, Italy MHMD’s data and identity protection systems are aimed to be the
(emf@lynkeus.com); Project web site: www.myhealthmydata.eu. best privacy and security tools allowing to guarantee the overall
Besides Lynkeus, MHMD involves four other SMEs (from Austria, France, and reliability of a generic multi modular architecture.
two from the UK), four research centres and academia (Greece, Italy, Romania,
Switzerland), four clinical centres (from Germany, Italy, and two from the A key goal of MHMD is to improve the design of data-driven
UK), a legal firm (Belgium & Italy), and one industrial company (Germany). platforms and to foster the development of an information
2017, Copyright is with the authors. Published in the Workshop Proc. of the marketplace, in which individuals will be able to exercise full
EDBT/ICDT 2017 Joint Conference (March 21, 2017, Venice, Italy) on CEUR-
WS.org (ISSN 1613-0073). Distribution of this paper is permitted under the
control on their personal data and leverage their value.
terms of the Creative Commons license CC-by-nc-nd 4.0