HuaChain Health: Revolutionizing Medical Research with Big Data and Blockchain Technology

Clinical research relies on efficient medical data collection and aggregation, yet the path to big data research for clinicians is fraught with challenges.

Due to concerns regarding medical data security and patient privacy protection, medical data is often fragmented across various departments and specialists. It is difficult to achieve large-scale standardization through the individual efforts of clinicians alone. Many hospitals are currently dedicated to building research big data platforms to consolidate data collection and governance across different departments or disease types. However, the data sources used are often limited to within the hospital, failing to aggregate data from patients with similar conditions across a specific region. This results in small sample sizes for research data and significant biases in the resulting scientific findings.

Furthermore, to achieve high-level scientific research outcomes, clinicians often need to work with biological samples and genetic data. However, hospital information systems fail to provide the characteristic analytical data on biological samples and genetic data required by researchers, resulting in incomplete research datasets.

Therefore, how to achieve effective aggregation and secure sharing of medical data across hospitals, establish a comprehensive lifecycle database for clinical research, and thereby ensure the coherence and integrity of research data has become an urgent challenge in medical research both domestically and internationally.

To address the aforementioned pain points, Hualian Medical was established in Jinan, Shandong Province, in 2018, with the mission of serving medical and clinical research and striving to build a globally leading comprehensive platform for medical big data.

Although Hualian Medical has been established for only two years, its research in big data and blockchain is already deeply rooted. The core team at Hualian Medical has achieved significant results in transforming medical data into high-quality clinical research, possesses practical experience in establishing the U.S. Clinical Data Alliance, and has a clear understanding of the developmental differences and respective advantages of medical data systems both domestically and internationally.

In the summer of 2018, Hualian Medical entered into a tripartite collaboration with Shandong University and the People's Government of Shizhong District, Jinan City, to jointly establish the Hualian Medical Innovation Center. This center set up a professional medical research translation platform and business incubator on a 2,000-square-meter site.

Currently, Hualian Medical, leveraging the Institute of Health and Medical Big Data at Shandong University, has established an R&D collaborative team composed of domestic and international experts. Understanding medical data typically requires interdisciplinary knowledge spanning medicine, biostatistics, epidemiology, and informatics. Notably, the Hualian Medical team includes numerous researchers with cross-disciplinary backgrounds in mathematics and medicine. In the field of causal inference methods within informatics, the team ranks among the top in China in terms of the quantity, quality, and citation count of their publications.

Yang Cheng, CTO of Hualian Medical, told VCBeat: “Given the different national contexts, China needs to establish a medical data alliance that facilitates seamless communication between hospitals and universities, similar to what Hualian previously did when participating in the U.S. Clinical Data Alliance in New York.”

Blockchain, once hailed as an emerging technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, represents a novel application paradigm integrating computer technologies such as distributed data storage, peer-to-peer transmission, consensus mechanisms, and cryptographic algorithms. Since its inception, Hualian Medical has been dedicated to the development of blockchain technology, focusing on integrating medical data with blockchain solutions to empower medical research.

When discussing what sets Hualian Medical apart, Yang Cheng stated, “The barriers to entry for entrepreneurship in medical scientific research and medical data services are relatively high. Without a professional background and over a decade of experience in data-driven healthcare, it is difficult to break into this field.” While the technical threshold for blockchain is not high, market acceptance of the concept has been a major obstacle on its entrepreneurial path. “In the past two years, blockchain technology was new and demanded high standards. Only a small number of people dared to explore the integration of blockchain and big data, leaving very little precedent to draw upon.”

The blockchain “fire” that ignited in 2019 arrived somewhat earlier than anticipated.

Regarding the recent surge in popularity of blockchain, the Hualian Medical team believes that although the timing of this “explosive” trend is somewhat premature, the heightened societal attention will help attract more top-tier talent into the blockchain industry, thereby accelerating technological breakthroughs and ushering in the wave of blockchain development ahead of schedule.

“Big data consortia in China lag behind their international counterparts by at least seven to eight years.” International big data consortia were established earlier, with earlier development in the disciplines of data science; they achieve higher data quality despite limited data resources and produce higher-quality scientific research outcomes.

Faced with the development gap between China and other countries, the Hualian Medical team remains optimistic. In fact, China has its own advantages in building a big data alliance. First, China starts from a high baseline, emphasizing data privacy and security. With its large population base, China enjoys certain advantages in both the volume of data samples and the diversity of data types. Based on larger sample sizes, research findings can be better validated and more precisely refined.

Hualian Medical will leverage cutting-edge technologies such as big data and blockchain to build an innovative underlying distributed shared blockchain platform.

This platform is described as a distributed data pool, to which partner hospitals collectively contribute clinical data. It is important to note that the data within the pool is stored in encrypted form, preventing direct cross-institutional access by any hospital. If a hospital requires relevant data for research purposes, it may submit an application; the data will only be released to the requesting hospital after obtaining signed authorization from both the hospital providing the data and the patients involved. Furthermore, all data in the pool undergoes de-identification processing to conceal sensitive patient information.

Hualian Medical has established a medical big data research platform based on distributed big data technology, employing proprietary algorithms to encrypt data across hospitals, departments, and even distinct research projects within the same department, thereby ensuring the security of medical data and patient privacy.

This platform comprises a distributed data routing platform, a data governance platform, a scientific research cloud platform, and a health application platform. In the first step, guided pathways are established on the distributed big data infrastructure to perform preliminary governance of local data, after which the distributed big data platforms are interconnected via blockchain middleware. In the second step, to meet scientific research needs, the data is standardized into medical data organized across its full lifecycle for research purposes. In the third step, following preliminary data analysis and processing, corresponding scientific research services are provided to hospitals, universities, government agencies, and other institutions, leveraging methodologies from biostatistics and epidemiology.

Currently, the Hualian Medical Big Data Research Platform enhances hospitals’ research capabilities, provides electronic medical record (EMR) data services, and offers operational decision support; empowers academic research at universities; supports government agencies by analyzing resident health profiles, informing policy decisions, and bolstering the health big data industry; and enters the insurtech sector by providing analytical support for actuarial tasks such as medical insurance reinsurance.

It is reported that Hualian Medical will next expand its data business scope to pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, and insurance enterprises, while providing regional healthcare assessment services.

It is reported that Huajian Medical’s platform now covers all major Grade A tertiary hospitals in Shandong Province, with plans to expand nationwide within two years. To enlarge its R&D and sales teams and establish an overseas R&D center, Huajian Medical is launching a new round of financing.Institutions interested in the company should contact the financing assistant, Xiao Yun: DongMai_Investent.