Building Trust in Precision Healthcare

SECTOR UPDATE  - University of Canterbury

Precision Healthcare (PHC) is a new inclusion to the digital health paradigm that integrates emerging information technologies like Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented technologies, Blockchain and Smart Contracts, the Internet of Things, and Wearables to provide tailored healthcare for individuals in optimised time and cost.

It accommodates genomic banks and has evident potential to decrease genomic sequencing prices. It also has the potential to reduce conventional healthcare expenses and medication errors and may address health workforce constraints of patient-physician ratios.

Despite such potential, PHC’s application is limited to treating chronic diseases (e.g., diabetes, tumours, cancer) only in current days. Recent studies show that people are not getting engaged in PHC due to distrust. Gradual increase of cyberattacks and hacking of healthcare data, fear of embarrassment, stigma, discrimination, disclosure of identity, race, and ethnicity, unauthorised access and viewing health data, and the risk of unsatisfactory physician-patient relationships compound this distrust among people.

Dr. Arnob Zahid, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Canterbury, has designed a PHC ecosystem that focuses on the ongoing patient engagement challenges in PHC. The research was supervised by Professor Ravishankar Sharma (Zayed University, UAE), Associate Professor Stephen Wingreen, and Senior Lecturer Anushia Inthiran (University of Canterbury, New Zealand).

The ecosystem is designed in collaboration with healthcare professionals from Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, China, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The ecosystem complies with the best practice principles recommended in recent scientific and socio-technical studies. The system incorporates Blockchain technology to establish the needed trust for the system.

Blockchain is the most consistent technology to date for system security and transparency. Due to its nature of immutability and decentralisation, Blockchain can ensure a trust-less environment for the system and its user. The system also incorporates emerging augmented technologies to provide patients with tailored, precision health and care services.

Inclusion of Blockchain and augmented technologies have already evident potential to meet the current and future health data needs. In the ongoing pandemic, we have seen how these emerging technologies are being involved in delivering healthcare and saving humanity. Widespread, real-world implementation of such an ecosystem is likely to be the only practical way of achieving the United Nations desired Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) in healthcare by 2030.

Authors
Arnob Zahid - Department of Accounting and Information Systems, College of Business and Law, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, arnob07@yahoo.com
Ravishankar Sharma - College of Technological Innovation, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, rs.sharma.sg@gmail.com
Stephen Wingreen - Department of Accounting and Information Systems, College of Business and Law, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, stephen.wingreen@canterbury.ac.nz
Anushia Inthiran - Department of Accounting and Information Systems, College of Business and Law, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, anushia.inthiran@canterbury.ac.nz

Source: University of Canterbury media release

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