BTC Wires: The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York announced
BTC Wires: The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York announced this week the launch of a Center for Biomedical Blockchain’s Research. This center will be involved in research and collaborate with firms that are trying to create blockchain solutions in the biomedical field.
The Center is headed by Noah Zimmerman and Joel Dudley. The former researches on designing technologies driven by data to enhance decision-making in the health sphere, while the latter deals with use of machine intelligence in order to handle issues in healthcare and research.
The hospital’s Dr. Dudley remarked on the great excitement that surrounds the potential of applying blockchain technology. Even so, he noted that a lot of effort remains to be expended in this field in order to identify and work on the key features of blockchain, in order to take care of grassroot healthcare issues.
Dr. Zimmerman remarked that the team was focused on attaining expertise in the fields of data management, machine learning and biomedical infosystems. By enhancing delivery and boosting cost-effectiveness, blockchain would benefit the sphere effectively.
Mount Sinai, ranked 153rd in the world and 65th in the United States, is one of the new additions to the innovation ecosystem trying to build a bridge between blockchain and healthcare. Many firms have been working in this field for a while, with participants being involved in clinical trials and taking health insurance to markets that have not yet been tapped.
Anti-counterfeiting and increasing the potential to reproduce research are also explored within the ambit of this space. As Dr. Zimmerman added, our times have provided us with a chance to innovate on the various
ways of organising and incentivizing health care at large. Dr. Dudley continued that this Center would promote early use in regions that lack appropriate and adequate resources. Besides, he added, since health care is largely fragmented everywhere, flow of information continues to contend with bottlenecks that blockchain should be able to ease. He hopes to see the center address the needs of unserved categories of people to develop a global healthcare system that is largely unified.
The new Center comes under the umbrella of the Mount Sinai Institution for Next Generation Healthcare which works with sensors, robotics, cloud computing etc., among others. Although other sectors have embraced and adopted blockchain with greater efficiency, healthcare is yet to do so. It remains to be seen if the new initiative by Mount Sinai changes that and transforms the healthcare sector or not. If adopted efficiently, blockchain could enhance transparency and reliability, cut costs and boost speed in healthcare services, thereby benefiting the industry at large as well as the patients and users of the system.