IBM Watson, CDC on the hunt for new blockchain apps for healthcare | Healthcare IT News

While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been pursuing trials to explore new ways to manage data, Big Blue is focused on blockchain’s security protections.

In what it says is an expansion of its existing federal work with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, IBM Watson Health has signed on with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help explore new applications for blockchain in healthcare.

IBM Chief Science Officer Shahram Ebadollahi revealed the news this week at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York.

CDC has already been running a series of pilots aimed to explore blockchain’s real-world potential, and Ebadollahi said the more participants who join in to help put it distributed ledger tools to work across the healthcare, the faster it could help tackle some of the industry’s most challenging interoperability, security and other data management issues.

[Also: IBM Watson, FDA align to boost public health with blockchain]

And when combined with AI, he said, blockchain holds big promise for managing patient data over time and across various care settings.

Source/More: IBM Watson, CDC on the hunt for new blockchain apps for healthcare | Healthcare IT News