The opening of a new Biomedical Blockchain Research Center was announced by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare which aims to solve healthcare and medical science issues with new technologies and data.

The new center is welcomed at a time when lots of health systems are inquisitive about the implementation of blockchain and analyst firms in real cases. Gartner and IDC spoke to IT executives suggesting that strategies should be built around the technology or they could be outrun by rival hospitals that do it first. 

The new center would be led by Joel Dudley, executive vice president of Precision Health at Mount Sinai. His research concerns the application of artificial intelligence to crack problems in biology and hence, this center will go together with that work by making use of EHRs, wearables, and linked digital health data to build analytical healthcare applications.

Mount Sinai is hopeful that the new center’s research will build the foundation for its upcoming business partnership program that would be targeting companies interested in biomedical blockchain, a technology that detects and resolves issues in clinical medicine and biomedical research.

“This experience will allow us to address many of the most promising uses for blockchain in biomedicine with the goal of improving healthcare delivery and reducing costs,” Dudley said in a statement. “Many companies are already exploring the use of blockchain technologies in biology and healthcare.”

The technology can be applied in drug production, clinical research trials, enhancing quality control in the pharmaceutical domain to diminish bogus drugs, and augment consistency of research results.

Dudley added, “Our aim is to understand how blockchain and associated technologies can be applied to unmet needs in healthcare and biomedicine.”