New Blockchain Project Protects Medical Data from Breaches

hatu (76)in #bitcoin • 8 years ago (edited)

Data is an extremely valuable resource and companies go through bounds to acquire it. Sadly, not enough measures are taken to secure it. One of the blockchain’s prime benefits is that it provides extreme security measures against nay nefarious members of society. Some of the earliest blockchain projects aimed at securing consumers’ money, but now an increasing number of projects are seeing data protection can be a powerful natural utility of blockchain technology

Shivom, a new blockchain project aimed at storing genomic data and developing a marketplace for it, provides a solution to secure a crucial and extremely personal data category.

Data Breaches

Data breaches are not as uncommon as people may think, even the extremely expensive and dangerous ones. Major corporations like Equifax, JP Morgan, Home Depot, Yahoo!, Adobe, Target Stores, and many more have faced data breaches that have led to the critical consumer data to be compromised by hackers. The results are devastating for both consumers and companies.

Consumers

Consumers face the primary brunt of data breaches. Their data gets stolen and often the hackers can abuse it in various ways. The Equifax breach gives hackers the potential to steal the identities of millions of Americans, the breach on Yahoo! gives hackers contact information on billions of users, and breaches on various other companies gives access to consumers’ financial and payment card information.

As the health care industry increasingly incorporates data utility in its operations, consumers’ healthcare data could be at severe risk. If technology companies, that should be best armed to fight off breaches, have had limited success in holding back hacks, the medical industry, which specializes in healthcare, has ever worse odds at holding back breaches.

Companies

When companies’ databases get breached, they do not face the brunt of losing valuable private information, but they suffer monetary losses. Yahoo!, for example, had to drop its core internet business’s value by $350 million due to the data breach it suffered.

Many other companies have had to pay compensation fees to users whose data was compromised and have also suffered expenses necessary to replace critical security features.

Shivom: One of the Heroes

Various blockchain projects are arising to secure consumers and companies against data breaches and hacks. Shivom is paving the way for increased data security in the healthcare industry.

Healthcare information, particularly genomic data, is extremely sensitive. It holds the deepest secrets of what anyone is made of, their ethnic identities, their physical limitations, etc. Such information could be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands, and is therefore in imminent need of protection.

Shivom, by utilizing blockchain technology, provides a secure mechanism to allow healthcare facilities to access patients’ genomic data; it also allows a secure marketplace for companies to buy people’s genomic data. Such utilization of genomic data holds the key to advancing the future of the healthcare market. Shivom is not only providing a means to efficiently access genomic data, even for specific individuals, but also provides the technological resources to secure it.

With Shivom, the medical world is able to take a step forward without having to worry about the massive damage a breach on genomic data could cause to an average person or even a major healthcare company.