South Korean Government Turns to Blockchain Tech to More Securely Store Clinical Diabetes Data

The South Korean government wants to develop a blockchain registry to help analyze, anonymize and store clinical data for diabetes.

Blockchain startup Sendsquare has been selected by the government to develop a proof-of-concept project for the nation, which has around 3.6 million people with diabetes, the company announced on Friday.

The startup will team with clinical experts and practitioners from Seoul’s KyungHee University Medical Center to begin analyzing nine years’ worth of diabetes clinical data previously collected by the center.

“Storing and collaborating work across a large volume of data using centralized services has proven unwieldy and subject to issues of data loss, duplication and manipulation,” according to KyungHee Medical Center’s Professor Suk Chon.

Sendsquare’s blockchain “can help us to solve data storage problems, and in the long term help diabetes sufferers nationally,” the professor said in a press statement.

The project will take an estimated six months to complete, with the initial objective to analyze the data working to anonymize it before finally implementing the data onto a registry which will be recorded on an unspecified blockchain platform.

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After the blockchain application has been developed, Sendsquare will seek independent verification from Korea’s Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA).

Sendsquare is a blockchain startup responsible for the development of the South Korea-based FLETA blockchain which was previously charged with building a proof-of-concept network for the nation’s healthcare system.