The Bitfury Group has announced (Feb 11) on its official blog that its next project will be in the medical scene. By partnering Medical Diagnostic Web (MDW) and Longenesis, Bitfury will utilize blockchain for the development of a medical imaging ecosystem.

Bitfury is better known as a heavyweight in the Bitcoin mining infrastructure space, while MDW connects radiologists and diagnostic data on a decentralized blockchain platform. Longenesis is a startup collaboration between Bitfury and Insilico Medicine, focusing on integrating AI with Bitfury’s blockchain in the medical space.  

The trio will work together to design a system that ensures the safekeeping and secure sharing of medical information such as surgical and diagnostic data and tests, patient records, CAT scans, MRI, and X-rays. Bitfury will be developing the new system on the firm’s private blockchain framework Exonum to implement “anchoring” technology in the process.

Only authorized personnel or organizations with the exactly required security keys can gain access to the information. Bitfury also claimed that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be strictly followed in the system’s development.

Bitfury wrote that this “groundbreaking combination of new technologies” will “ take the security of sensitive medical information to the next level. It will provide users with a more robust and discrete environment, while allowing transactions to be validated by nodes installed at a variety of respected sites”.

In addition, Bitfury CEO Valery Vavilov said, “Blockchain technology can strengthen patient data security by providing a tamper-proof record of patient history while simultaneously providing an avenue for doctors to more easily share information… The digitization of trust that blockchain offers, paired with the medical potential of AI algorithms, has the ability to revitalize medical systems all over the world.”