YouBase
Enriching Patient-Centered Healthcare

“How can we unlock the potential of patient health data while securing privacy for better care?”—the question that always puzzled neuroscientist Leonard Kish and soon transformed him into a healthcare entrepreneur even as he envisioned true patient-centered healthcare delivery. The drive led him to develop a secure patient health data sharing platform in the form of YouBase that leverages blockchain technology to authenticate users, build trust anonymously, and facilitate sharing of quality health data. YouBase offers a truly secure way to connect healthcare organizations and patients by combining blockchain-compatible technologies to establish an independent and unified location for data storage. The foolproof data repository supports the building of a proficient data marketplace that plays a crucial role in advancing healthcare innovation.

With YouBase, patients get the granular level of authority concerning the data that they want to share with the other participants custodian network (the YouBase community). “Our solution’s highly flexible and secure digital wallet-like architecture allows the user to add any data type, which others users can utilize in a structured and meaningful way,” explains Kish, Co-Founder and CEO, YouBase. Moreover, the individuals can control how much data they want to reveal. YouBase enables users to separate the personally identifiable information from the clinical data that can be shared across various health applications. As YouBase ensures the security and anonymity of the user information, it brings in a whole new way for people to trust and participate in developing precision-based medicine. All of the data both at rest and in transit are encrypted in the system that nullifies the existence of virtual data honeypots that can be vulnerable to exploitation.

The company has developed a set of libraries containing a program for creating the YouBase wallet based on data structure as well as custodians’ requirements. According to Kish, the requirements of the custodians—the original data holders— are the key points as they can hold the data in a completely encrypted format.

Our solution’s highly flexible and secure digital wallet-like architecture allows the user to add any data type, which others users can use in a structured and meaningful way

This is a big advantage for the most custodians of data who are unwilling to reconstruct their existing data storage architecture to a distributed hash table or a decentralized architecture. YouBase offers a model for custodians that can control the data environment and provide data access to the user. In a typical YouBase environment, for any application to access a particular patient’s data, it has to first get the user’s consent for interfacing with the user profile and for gaining access to their data. Then the YouBase team implements their code library on the particular organizational system’s backend, allowing seamless and secure data sharing.

Currently, YouBase is working on a consumer application that allows people to access and share their information and control how that data is shared between applications. The company is working with several current data holders and are providing more control to the users. They are also working on specific blockchain enhancements for improved performance and ease-of-use for the users within the community. YouBase also focuses on implementing innovative upgrades in terms of adding more user controls for data access. In addition, recognizing the fact that people-centric health data exchange is the future of Health IT and precision medicine, the firm is planning to extend their technology into the clinical trial arena.