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Hacking Health in Hamilton Ontario - Let's hear that pitch!

What compelled me to register for a weekend Health Hackathon? Anyway, I could soon be up to my ears in it. A pubmed search on Health Hack...

Showing posts with label eHealth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eHealth. Show all posts

Saturday, July 17, 2021

Home Epley Maneuver: Ear Crystal Vertigo from Youtube Instructions

Have you ever woken up in a state of vertigo when you rise from the bed - the room spinning around so much you have to stay lying down? You start to wonder what you ate the previous night. Well, it could just be crystals in the ear moving out of their proper channels that signal sensitive areas of the ear which results in the spinning sensation. What to do?

How can we trust all the information we search for on the internet, especially health information so vital for the state of our well being. We often enact this advise without professional medical advice. But if the information we find comes from health professions.

In the case of ear crystals, here are several instructions posted by medical professionals for maneouvers you can do to try and correct the ear crystal vertigo problem. The formal name for the instructions is the Epley manouever,

The instructor....

Dr. Danielle Tolman, PT takes the time to show you how to perform an Epley Maneuver at home to treat Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (or displaced crystals in the inner ear that causes positional dizziness). Additionally, she shows you how to determine which side (left or right) is the side with the displaced crystals and provides you with tips to ensure your maneuver has the best chance for success.

NOTE: It is recommended that if you have vertigo, that you first see a healthcare professional or vestibular specialist to determine the right course of treatment for you. The Epley maneuver is primarily used to treat a specific form of positional vertigo. There are many other causes of vertigo, as well as many different types of treatment.

You can find a vestibular therapist close to you by visiting www.Vestibular.org and using their Provider Directory. Be sure to check out the Vestibular Disorders Association (VEDA) for additional information and resources.

Also recommended are physiotherapists like on the healingvertigo.com website. Sometimes headaches and room spinning are caused by vestibular migraine! 

http://www.healingvertigo.ca/


Thursday, March 26, 2020

digital health initiatives in the wake of COVID-19


6. 17-year-old builds a website to closely track the Coronavirus epidemic and now millions are using it:https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/13/meet_the_17_year_old_behind

7. Flatten the Curve. Volunteer engineers and clinicians big data real-time heatmap of potential and confirmed COVID-19 cases: https://flatten.ca/

8. Ontario, Alberta, etc., billing codes for primary virtual visits: https://ontariomd.news/

9. Wildly Popular South Korean covid-19 tracker app: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/wildly-popular-coronavirus-tracker-app-helps-south-koreans-steer-clear-of-outbreak-areas-2020-03-18

10. South Korean coronavirus tracking apps: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-south-korea-photos-apps-location-outbreak-where-2020-3#the-app-collects-data-from-public-government-info-including-the-korea-centers-for-disease-control-to-show-the-date-a-patient-was-diagnosed-with-covid-19-along-with-the-persons-nationality-age-gender-and-where-they-visited-2

11. WeDoctor - free consultation from medical clinicians: https://promo.guahao.com/en/global/pneumonia

12. Donate PPE in Canada: https://togetherwecandothis.ca/

13. National Emergency Library - Free books online: http://www.openculture.com/2020/03/the-national-emergency-library-makes-nearly-1-5-million-books-free-to-read-right-now.html

14. MIT Emergency Ventilator Project: https://e-vent.mit.edu/

15. Canadian MD Ventilator Hack 1 ventilator for 9 people: https://www.upworthy.com/canadian-doctors-brilliant-evil-genius-hack-turns-one-ventilator-into-nine

16. Nobel Laureate Leads Push for Made in Canada Ventilator: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-nobel-laureate-leads-push-for-simple-made-in-canada-ventilator/

17. Medical Futurist - COVID-19 Was Needed for Telemedicine to Finally Go Mainstream: https://medicalfuturist.com/covid-19-was-needed-for-telemedicine-to-finally-go-mainstream/

18. Project Northern Lights - Groups of Canadians using Slack to hack projects for COVID:  https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadians-use-crowdsourcing-to-produce-medical-supplies-for-health/

19. SECDEV looking for Cybersecurity IT Professionals to volunteer to protect healthcare centres from disinformation, ransom ware attacks, etc:https://www.secdev.com/

20. FutureLoop - Pandemic Edition: https://futureloop.com/register/coronavirus/












32. How is my Flattening?  includes vaccination percentages for Ontario

33. Canada's Public Health Data Meltdown - MacLeans article by Justin Ling


35. ProMed - International Society for the Infectious Diseases









Wednesday, November 7, 2018

eHealth Ontario Watch how access to diagnostic images and reports benefits health care providers and their patients

Digital Health Success Stories
With the recent launch of the Diagnostic Imaging (DI) Common Service, health care providers can now view diagnostic images and reports performed at facilities across the province, in one place.  In August, the service was made available to all authorized users in the Greater Toronto Area as well as in northern and eastern Ontario through the ConnectingOntario ClinicalViewer.  It’s also now available at two hospital organizations in south west Ontario, providing additional patient data to ClinicalConnect users who currently see reports and images and produced within their own region, and is being rolled out to more sites in the coming months. Thanks to this integration, health care providers can now obtain a more complete picture of their patient’s health, regardless of their location.

 
Watch the video above to see how health care providers like Dr. Koff benefit by having quick access to their patients’ diagnostic images and reports. This helps to eliminate the need for patients to carry around CD’s containing their DI information to specialist’s offices. It also eliminates the need to mail or fax test results, and the costly duplication of scans. Most importantly for patients, this network allows specialists at one facility to access images performed at other locations, allowing for more informed, timely medical decisions.

Help Us Share This Story
Help others see firsthand how our work today is enhancing delivery of patient care in Ontario. Our mission is to foster an electronic health care system that puts the patient first, by leveraging existing systems and building new ones to connect health care providers with their patients' medical information.
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Wednesday, May 30, 2018

eHealth forever or technology forever?

I have been writing this "ehealth enabled browser" blog on eHealth since after I graduated with a M.Sc. in eHealth in 2012. I will probably be spending a lot less time blogging here. I still enjoy following the various topics and points of interest that I have encountered in digital health.  Recently one of the great health informatics bloggers, Dr. John Halamka - the Geek Doctor - has decided to wind down his blog. Looks like he is taking more to the twitter sphere. I highly recommend you check that out if you are interested in Health Informatics (or life in general).

A little while ago something I read inspired me to think about writing the ebook version of the "ehealth enabled browser" that I have run here on the earthspiritendless URL at blogspot.ca  Turns out I may have received more inspiration than the perspiration necessary to do that. For the time being, I will settle for writing this post. This will try to encapsulate what I think I have learned by following digital health during this blog experience. To start off  - let me try to explain the significance of the title of this post - eHealth forever or technology forever?

I saw a TED talk where I heard that essentially "technology lives forever" (Kevin Kelly - How Technology Evolves). To illustrate this point the presenter used the example of a steel plow, the kind our ancestors not so long ago pulled behind horses or oxen. A schematic or blueprint of this technology would allow anyone with the technology to replicate it - in essence, bringing it back to life. The technology will last many hundreds of years and would still exist in some less than functional form even after the warranty expires. When it is totally broken, you create another one. Maybe the most difficult thing is just preserving the knowledge and information to manufacture it.  Well, biological beings might appear to be in the same category - cloning DNA - but let's face it, we break down more permanently than the technology we have created. Which leads me to the URL name for this blog - earthspiritendless. The final word is going to be that none of this matters and that only the Earth abides. Nothing lasts forever.

I can't remember why I named this blog URL earthspiritendless when it was supposed to be about digital health and the study of health informatics. The title of the blog - "an ehealth enabled browser" - suggests a blog about someone "browsing" or reading about ehealth.  The URL name actually comes from the English translation for a Tibetan name a Tibetan Rinpoche (reincarnated Lama) gave me in Bodhgaya, India. It is not a riff on the sports wear company that makes earthspirit brand running shoes. I always did have some fear that the company would track me down and accuse me of infringing on their brand or something. The fact of the matter is that there is no connection between ehealth and the Tibetan "nom de religion".

Since eHealth has a computer science focus there is always going to be an attraction to future technologies - for as we know - technology evolves. If you want to try to follow where computer technology is going in the future, there would be no better futurologist to consult than Ray Kurzweil, currently Chief Engineer at Google. It was by reading his books and starting this blog that I began to see a convergence in the ideas of transhumanism, the singularity, and health informatics - a future where we need to learn how about the role of the health care system along with life extension concepts and technologies. I also read his weekly Accelerating Intelligence reports on new discoveries in science and technology, and have a link to it on the blog.

In the field of eHealth itself one of my overall impressions is the continual need for research and systematic reviews on the efficacy of eHealth for improving health and quality of life, as well as a return on investment. The latter just means an improvement in the quality of life. This is where the great service of such academic venues as the Journal of Medical Internet Research is focused. If I was to go back 7 years with a serious intent to study eHealth - toward a PhD for example - I would be busy reading, saving and studying journal articles. eHealth is a business, computer science, and health science interdisciplinary work, and it is always important to keep that in mind when reading and assessing journal articles.

I suppose if I was to generalize about what I have reviewed in digital health into categories of most interest to me and this blog, I could come up with something like this:
  1. Careers
  2. Ethics of Technology
  3. Life Extension
  4. Personal Health Records - Toward the Quantified Self
  5. Spiritual machines
Careers

A spiritual master was once asked what is man's greatest need and the answer was "having work to do". Sorry I don't have a reference for that or even if I have reworded that correctly, but it really means that we find no real meaning in life unless we do work.  Health Informatics as an educational program is an applied field where internships are developed, so it is career oriented from the beginning. One reason I studied it was the possibility of making a career change into what I perceived was an exciting field that had many new developments on the horizon. This blog was never going to provide me with an income from the google ads ( I made enough to buy a few cups of coffee so thanks for those clicks!). I once thought of extending it as a possible business and I secured an URL called ehealthenabled.ca with the intent of developing a site/service for ways of empowering people to use ehealth technology.

That ehealthenabled.ca site didn't run for longer than a year, and I used it mostly to explore again web development in the suite of web hosting software one finds in Control Panel. I learned that WordPress is better than blogspot for creating content. My problem was that I didn't really know what kind of content to bring to market. I had a vague sort of idea that what we need for public and preventative health were ehealth technology "garages" in every neighbourhood. When cars were mechanically breaking down all the time, every neighbourhood had a repair garage - all gone now as pumping stations have consolidated and cars no longer break down as frequently.  These self-service or consultant oriented ehealth stations would also have exercise equipment and all kinds of mobile ehealth technology available, including DIY ultrasound, tDCS etc - after working through the health, safety and privacy concerns of course. We know now how important exercise is for health and having access to resistance training equipment -and/or health coaches - is a fundamental health technology.

The other and perhaps most interesting aspect about an eHealth career is the current potential for entrepeneurship, start-ups, and innovation. eHealth is an applied field, an application of ideas and technologies to solve ever changing and challenging problems in healthcare. I have participated in several Health Hackathons and it would have been great to get involved in some of these types of activities a lot earlier. I would also like to turn the clock back a few more years so I wouldn't miss the mobile app programming bus! Knew that one was coming - did nothing much about it.

Ethics of Technology

Since I work professionally in an ethics related career ( university research ethics) I naturally have had an interest in technology and ethics. For many years I was more interested in bioethics generally and have some courses and conferences under my belt (including a conference presentation on RFID privacy and security concerns in Healthcare). In the past several years there has been a strong shift towards just focusing on the ethics of new technologies and I trace this back when Demi Hassabis sold his DeepMind artificial intelligence gaming software company to Google. Forming an ethics technology committee was a condition of the sale to Google. There is relevance to eHealth a lot here because at Google, Deep Mind went on to develop Alpha-Go the AI that defeated the best Go players in the world. Alpha-Go is also being used in Healthcare, much like IBM's Watson.

There is a really comprehensive research group that also has an open source journal called the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies -  https://ieet.org/. It is interesting to follow this group. I once tried to interest them in publishing an essay I wrote about Steve Mann but I ended up posting it on my Linkedin page - a version of it at least.

Life Extension

I think I only seriously became interested in how life extension related to eHealth by reading Ray Kurzweil. Medicine is more and more becoming an information science apparently. I think the corner was turned on that once medical reference libraries went digital. Living forever is a serious science fiction theme but if Ray is right and exponential changes is happening in computer power, discoveries in science are going to accelerate.  The idea that we should be trying to stay healthy to live longer is not new, but the idea that we should seriously try to stay healthy in order to possibly benefit by new life extension technologies that will be available after the singularity - in 2030? - certainly is a new deck of cards.  The movie Elysium, one of probably a thousand or so that explore life extension ideas in science fiction had a credible healthcare technology that could cure any disease.

Is this something I personally want and help strive to attain? Something like this is a foundational and massively transformational (thank you Peter Diamandis for that concept)  movement and revolution in healthcare where the ethics of maintaining quality of life is so vital. What if we as individuals don't have a choice for how long we are going to live if even the dictates of healthcare ethics say we have to be preserved in some form of silicon based artificial intelligence while our biological DNA is being reprogrammed for cellular regeneration. Maybe it will just come down to a duty to care?

Another spiritual master was asked what was the secret to his longevity and health and he replied "Living off the interest of my investments". Sorry - no reference for that anywhere on the Internet at the moment. Maybe I heard that before the internet.

Personal Health Records - Toward the Quantified Self

The ehealth enabled blog explored a lot studies about personal health records. An aspect tangential to that is a concept called the "quantified self". Will collecting a lot of health data in a "do it yourself" sort of way help save us? I found it interesting to read about experiences with fitbit heart rate data, facebook posts on personal health issues, and other such patient lead data collecting activities, that have resulted in some life saving measures.

The really protracted issues that never seem to go away are the problems with data interoperability. It is hard to join an HL7 committee and help advance the work of interoperability (tried that).  Not everyone is cut out to help write standards. New standards then emerge - FHIR for example. Now there is talk about how the blockchain will be used for the "provenance" of information. Who owns my health data, me, my doctor, or the data miners?

My own conclusion here is mostly about usability.  Collecting our own personal health data should be like an ongoing construction or renovation project where the tools are easily accessible.  Are we not building the virtual self? Log ins to health records are cumbersome - so is typing up the data. Just let the healthcare system do it? We have to be able to better track and record our ongoing health concerns - with or without the healthcare system. I also think we need artificial intelligence in the health record in our social media to tell us when to do things, based on our profiles and our precision medicine disposition. Out of nowhere, we should get a suggestion to get a shingles vaccination!

Spiritual Machines

Meditation to me is a form of health technology, and my teachers were like physicians who prescribed the daily practices for my own benefit, and the benefit of all sentient beings. Experimenting with the Muse EEG headband which is designed to induce or teach one how to enter a meditative state was a highlight not only of my blog posting, but of my own meditation experiences. Though I learned meditation in a long, hard, and traditional kind of way, I truly value the potential for technologies like the Muse. Talking AI or virtual doctors aside, exploring our own calm states of mind is going to make us better people in the long run. For then, we will know what we know, and what we don't know.


Saturday, December 16, 2017

The Future of eHealth

A Health Research Methology graduate course in the MSc eHealth program at McMaster University has a class on the future of ehealth. It was one of my favourite classes when I was a student 8 years ago, and I was asked to be the tutorial facilitator for it for the past several years. Part of the course content was a video scenario of what a future patient physician encounter will look like.  I will embed the video I just found on Youtube:

The encounter is very humanistic in spite of the technology and involves a lot of artificial intelligence in the form of voice interaction. There is also plenty of newer user interfaces - transparent augmented reality medical records - and instant appointment and medical record searching.

Another article to read for that class is by Vannevar Bush called "As We May Think", written in July 1945. Dr. Bush was the Director of Scientific Research and Development for the United States Government. He writes about something he calls a "memex" which would be very much like the computers we are using today.  At that time, there was an explosion of scientific knowledge around the world but there was no way to organize that knowledge or search on it. It is an interesting article to read if you try to imagine what someone writing the article today would have to say about technology or medicine 70 years from now, and actually coming to close to painting an accurate picture about it. If technology is changing exponentially, will that even be possible?

The explosion of knowledge has continued since then and we collect, distribute and analyze it daily as it arrives in our twitter and facebook feeds. A lot of the information that can be gleaned about the future of eHealth is thus kind of "grey literature" and not something that you can search and find on PubMed. These days I find viewing video stories on futurism.com the best ways I know to become excited about the future. "The pull of the future is greater than the push from the past" - I am still trying to find out which famous philosopher or scientist said that.

Here are just a few of the sources suggestive of the future of eHealth that I have been following with interest.  The first is Ray Kurzweil and his Accelerating Intelligence website.  Ray is a computer scientist and inventor who believes in transhumanism and indefinite life extension.  His group is always following the latest scientific advances and inventions of all kinds, and not just ones related to health technology. For example, I just read today a story they posted about a new kind of RFID tag for patients. This tag:
The RFID tags measure internal body motion, such as a heart as it beats or blood as it pulses under skin. Powered remotely by electromagnetic energy supplied by a central reader, the tags use a new concept called “near-field coherent sensing.” Mechanical motions (heartbeat, etc.) in the body modulate (modify) radio waves that are bounced off the body and internal organs by passive (no battery required) RFID tags.

The modulated signals detected by the tag then bounce back to an electronic reader, located elsewhere in the room, that gathers the data. Each tag has a unique identification code that it transmits with its signal, allowing up to 200 people to be monitored simultaneously.

A recent news feed I have been following is the Medical Futurist, Dr. Bertalan Mesko. Recently Dr. Mesko has had some involvement consulting with the Government of Canada, as you may read in his article: "Canada Brings Automation to Healthcare: An Example for Governments to Follow". Really worth following on Twitter or Facebook.

Another group that is interesting, but they are more about the current state and the breaking trends of Medicine and eHealth, is the Exponential Medicine group lead by Dr. Daniel Kraft- a part of the Singularity University. Similarly, there is the ongoing work and research of Dr. Eric Topol. Most of the students in my eHealth class that I was facilitating hadn't even heard of Dr. Topol so I was a bit taken aback.

In short, if you are not interested in the future of eHealth, I don't think there is any way that one would appreciate the changes that are currently going on.  In fact, the guest lecturer at the McMaster future of eHealth class, Dr. Ted Scott, Vice President Research & Chief Innovation Officer, did not talk about the future so much as he did about current innovations that are starting within the Hamilton Health Sciences. And this just made me think of something I learned when I was a student of anthropology many years ago, that yesterday's pseudo-science and magic is todays science.


Monday, November 6, 2017

3 dangerous ideas from Ray Kurzweil

 File this email I received from a Peter Diamandis subscription list under the Future of eHealth?

Recently I interviewed my friend Ray Kurzweil at the Googleplex for a 90-minute (live) webinar on disruptive and dangerous ideas, a prelude to my fireside chat with Ray at Abundance 360 this January. (Watch the replay here.)
Ray is my friend and the Co-founder and Chancellor of Singularity University.  He is also an XPRIZE Trustee, the Director of Engineering at Google, and one of the best predictors of our exponential future.
It’s my pleasure to share with you 3 compelling ideas that came from our conversation.
1. The Nation-State Will Soon Be Irrelevant
Historically, we humans don’t like change. We like waking up in the morning and knowing that that the world is the same as the night before.
That’s one reason why government institutions exist: to stabilize society.
But how will this change in 20 or 30 years? What role will stabilizing institutions play in a world of continuous, accelerating change?
“Institutions stick around, but they change their role in our lives,” Ray explained. “They already have. The nation-state is not as profound as it was. Religion used to direct every aspect of your life, minute to minute. It’s still important in some ways, but it's much less important, much less pervasive. [It] plays a much smaller role in most people's lives than it did, and the same is true for governments.”
Ray continues: “We are fantastically interconnected already. Nation-states are not islands anymore. So we're already much more of a global community. The generation growing up today really feels like world citizens much more than ever before, because they're talking to people all over the world and it's not a novelty.”
I’ve previously shared my belief that national borders have become extremely porous, with ideas, people, capital and technology rapidly flowing between nations. In decades past, your cultural identity was tied to your birthplace. In the decades ahead, your identify is more a function of many other external factors. If you love space, you’ll be connected with fellow space-cadets around the globe more than you’ll be tied to someone born next door.
2. We’ll hit longevity escape velocity before we realize we’ve hit it.
Ray and I share a passion for extending the healthy human lifespan.
I frequently discuss Ray’s concept of “longevity escape velocity” — the point at which, for every year that you’re alive, science is able to extend your life for more than a year.
Scientists are continually extending the human lifespan, helping us cure heart disease, cancer, and eventually neurodegenerative disease. This will keep accelerating as technology improves.
During my discussion with Ray, I asked him when he expects we’ll reach “escape velocity...”
His answer? “I predict it’s likely just another 10 to 12 years before the general public will hit longevity escape velocity.”
“At that point, biotechnology is going to have taken over medicine,” Ray added. “The next decade is going to be a profound revolution.”
From there, Ray predicts that nanorobots will “basically finish the job of the immune system,” with the ability to seek and destroy cancerous cells and repair damaged organs.
As we head into this sci-fi-like future, your most important job for the next 15 years is to stay alive. “Wear your seatbelt until we get the self-driving cars going,” Ray jokes.
The implications to society will be profound.  While the scarcity-minded in government will react saying, “Social Security will be destroyed,” the more abundance-minded will realize that extending a person’s productive earning lifespace from 65 to 75 or 85 years old would be a massive boom to the GDP.
3. Technology will help us define and actualize human freedoms.
The third dangerous idea from my conversation with Ray is about how technology will enhance our humanity, not detract from it.
You may have heard critics complain that technology is making us less human, and increasingly disconnected.
Ray and I share a slightly different viewpoint: that technology enables us to tap into the very essence of what it means to be human.
“I don’t think humans even have to be biological,” explained Ray. “I think humans are the species that changes who we are.”
Ray argues that this began when humans developed the earliest technologies -- fire and stone tools. These tools gave people new capabilities, and became extensions of our physical bodies.
At its base level, technology is the means by which we change our environment, and change ourselves. This will continue, even as the technologies themselves evolve.
“People say, ‘Well, do I really want to become part machine?’ You're not even going to notice it,” says Ray, “because it's going to be a sensible thing to do at each point.”
Today, we take medicine to fight disease and maintain good health, and would likely consider it irresponsible if someone refused to take a proven, life-saving medicine.
In the future, this will still happen -- except the medicine might have nanobots that can target disease, or will also improve your memory so you can recall things more easily.
And because this new medicine works so well for so many, public perception will change. Eventually, it will become the norm… as ubiquitous as penicillin and ibuprofen are today.
In this way, ingesting nanorobots, uploading your brain to the cloud, and using devices like smart contact lenses can help humans become, well, better at being human.
Ray sums it up: “We are the species that changes who we are to become smarter and more profound, more beautiful, more creative, more musical, funnier, sexier.”
Speaking of sexuality and beauty, Ray also sees technology expanding these concepts. “In virtual reality, you can be someone else. Right now, actually changing your gender in real reality is a pretty significant, profound process, but you could do it in virtual reality much more easily and you can be someone else. A couple could become each other and discover their relationship from the other's perspective.”
In the 2030s, when Ray predicts sensor-laden nano robots will be able to go inside the nervous system, virtual or augmented reality will become exceptionally realistic, enabling us to “be someone else and have other kinds of experiences.”
Why Dangerous Ideas Matter
Why is it so important to discuss dangerous ideas?
I often say that the day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.
By consuming and considering a steady diet of “crazy ideas,” you train yourself to think bigger and bolder… a critical requirement for making impact.
As humans, we are linear and scarcity-minded.
As entrepreneurs, we must think exponentially and abundantly.
At the end of the day, the formula for a true breakthrough is equal to “having a crazy idea” you believe in, plus the passion to pursue that idea against all naysayers and obstacles.

Join Me

1. A360 Executive Mastermind: This is the sort of conversation I explore at my Executive Mastermind group called Abundance 360. The program is highly selective, for 360 abundance and exponentially minded CEOs (running $10M to $10B companies). If you’d like to be considered, apply here.
Share this with your friends, especially if they are interested in any of the areas outlined above.
2. Abundance-Digital Online Community: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance-Digital.
Abundance-Digital is my ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs – those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click here to learn more.

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Blockchain & eHealth: Towards Provable Privacy & Security in Data intensive Health Research




CALL FOR ABSTRACTS 
------------------ 

The First Workshop on "Blockchain & eHealth: Towards Provable Privacy & Security in Data intensive Health Research" will be held on: 

November 7, 2017, Markham (Greater Toronto area), Ontario 
https://www-01.ibm.com/ibm/cas/cascon/workshop.jsp 

The workshop is co-located with CASCON 2017: The Cognitive Era: Data, Systems and Society conference 
https://www-01.ibm.com/ibm/cas/cascon/ 

The registration for the conference and its workshops is free. 

The goal of this workshop is to bring together security, privacy and eHealth experts from academia, healthcare institutions, industry and public policy to focus on the challenges and opportunities of developing a blockchain enabled infrastructure that promotes trust between different stakeholders in health research and enables a provable privacy-aware path to real time access to patients data. 

We invite interested researchers to submit an abstract (limit of 500 words) reporting the state of their research relevant to the workshop objectives. Accepted abstract submissions will be invited to present in the workshop. Both research and application papers are solicited.  The submitted abstracts will be reviewed on the basis of technical quality, relevance, significance and clarity. We particularly encourage PhD students in the early stage of their research on blockchain and R&D managers who are planning the application of blockchain technology to submit an abstract to this workshop. 

Topics of this workshop include (but not limited to) the following: 

• Decentralized platforms for health information exchange 
• Public vs. private Blockchain for health research 
• Access control, anonymity and privacy issues among blockchain participants 
• Blockchain scalability issues and its solutions 
• Blockchain threat models, attacks, defenses and countermeasures 
• Network forensics in Blockchain 
• Blockchain trust verification models 
• Legal, ethical, and societal aspects of using blockchain in health research 
• Case studies (for adoption, attacks, etc.) 


WORKSHOP CHAIRS: 
- Reza Samavi, Department of Computing and Software, eHealth Program, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada 
- Thomas Doyle, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, eHealth Program, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada 
- Thodoros Topaloglou, Scarborough and Rouge Hospital, Toronto, Canada 

DEADLINES: 
- Oct. 23, 2017 Submission Deadline 
- Oct. 30, 2017 Acceptance Notification 
- Nov.   7, 2017 Presentation 

SUBMISSION: 
Please send your submissions, inquiries and correspondence on this workshop to (email to: samavir@mcmaster.ca) with the subject starting with "Workshop on Blockchain & eHealth:"