BurstIQ — Hive

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

BurstIQ was founded in 2015 with the goal of solving three fundamental challenges in the healthcare industry:

Health data lives in silos, with little or no integration to other data sources,
HIPAA regulations, while valuable and necessary, make it extremely hard to efficiently combine and share data between people and organizations who need it or would greatly benefit from it, and
People often have limited access to their own data, and it is often difficult to understand even if they can access it.

Given that the amount of health data generated by personal devices and the healthcare industry is expected to grow exponentially over the next five years, these challenges will become increasingly acute.

In the last two years, the BurstIQ platform has grown into a fully-operational platform, with sustainable revenue streams, multiple large business customers and hundreds of thousands of LifeGraphsTM.

In the first 12 months of operation, the BurstIQ platform processed 25 billion data points.

The BurstIQ platform leverages blockchain and machine intelligence to enable data from disparate sources to be brought together in a single, unified data repository, and to be shared quickly and easily while still maintaining HIPAA compliance. However, the platform goes beyond a simple health information exchange (HIE) or personal health record (PHR). BurstIQ has built an ecosystem where individuals can fully manage their data: they can share it or use it in exchange for access to products and services they care about. A platform where:

Individuals can access all of their health data in one place, and control who sees it and how they can use it.
Providers can see a complete view of their patients’ history, including out-of-network encounters, prescription fills, and lifestyle information, and can eliminate the administrative burden associated with medical record transfers.
Health systems can create more powerful decision support systems using comprehensive data, AI and deep learning. Patient acquisition and retention can be through targeted marketing of service lines.
Insurers and self-insured employers can create personalized wellness plans based on deep learning and machine intelligence, saving costs, improving outcomes and increasing productivity.
Biotech & pharmaceutical companies can find participants with the best genomic, proteomic or medical profile for their clinical trials and interact with them directly, eliminating administrative challenges and significantly reducing trial risk. In-market products can be specifically marketed to highly receptive audiences.
Researchers can find and access the people and data they need to support their research, and collaborate with other researchers to explore new ideas.
Digital health companies can increase the intelligence of their products with deep learning and AI. Products can be marketed directly to the most receptive audiences.

Access to comprehensive health data is becoming increasingly critical in the healthcare industry. It drives decision support systems, defines research and clinical trial cohort attributes, informs insurance plans, impacts reimbursements, and provides the foundation for many consumer–facing and B-to-B products and services. Data will be the currency of the coming Health Singularity, and BurstIQ will be the marketplace.

THE HEALTH SINGULARITY

Over the last decade, society has witnessed an explosion of health-related technology, from personal health trackers, to low-cost whole genome sequencing, to population health management tools. Currently, data from these sources is largely siloed — viewed and analyzed separately or using only cursory integration with other data sources.

The convergence of these data sources, effective management of complex data rights and application of machine intelligence will usher in a new era of health. One in which healthcare is customized to the individual based on their own unique genomic, proteomic, medical, demographic, socioeconomic and social profile: their LifeGraphTM. This is the true vision of person-centric health.

This is the Health Singularity.

DATA DRIVES THE HEALTH SINGULARITY

Data about you, what you do, how you feel, where you live, what you eat is the driving force behind person-centric health. Corporations want to own it, researchers want to study it, and every day, companies are finding new ways to collect more of it. Hackers know it’s valuable too; 1 in 4 security breaches are health-related, creating a multibillion dollar black market for health data and a multibillion dollar economic remediation burden for health providers. Yet, we as individuals can’t get to it, often don’t understand it, and can’t control who uses it.

At BurstIQ, we believe it’s time to change this. We believe people should own their data and should be able to decide who sees it, when they can see it, and what they can do with it. We believe that instead of corporations and hackers profiting from your data, you should be able to protect and profit from your data.

That’s why we created the BurstIQ Platform — a purpose-built platform for the person-centric revolution. A platform for the Health Singularity.

OUR VALUES

At BurstIQ, we believe…

You should own your data
You should have access to all your data in one place
You should have confidence that your data is safe
You should be able to trust and understand your data
You should be able to control who accesses your data
You should be able to help society with your data

OUR VISION

It’s simple. Make the world a healthier place.

OUR OBJECTIVES

Empower people.

Establish a LifeGraphTM for everyone on the planet. Make it free, simple to access, easy to use and secure. Provide individuals with the power to own, understand, use, and share their health data.

Expand health access.

Make the latest health advances accessible to everyone. Establish an open marketplace where new technologies, precision medicine services, clinical research studies and wellness benefits are available and intelligently tailored to individuals based on their LifeGraphTM profiles. Enable individuals to control what they see and enable solution providers to target the right audience at the right time.

Engage care providers.

Make it easy to leverage the power of data to optimize clinical outcomes and business operations. Minimize the effort required to incorporate new technologies into practice and utilize advanced analytics to create personalized care plans, increase patient engagement and drive down the cost of care.

Enable research and discovery.

Create a deep learning environment that continuously expands the knowledge of an individual to improve relevance and impact. Inspire new research, facilitate collaboration, and foster an environment of fast-paced learning. Enable researchers to connect directly with the right participants, reducing the cost and time-scale of both academic and commercial research.

Establish the authoritative secure data record.

Provide the framework for individuals and organizations to create secure, authoritative, and verified data sets. Provide a data marketplace where data owners can donate or sell their data, and purchase other data, without compromising security or ownership rights.

THE BURSTIQ PLATFORM

The BurstIQ Platform stores, manages, transfers and analyzes large, complex data sets by combining three core capabilities:

an innovative approach to securing data through extended blockchain constructs,
complex data rights management using smart contracts and dynamic permissioning, and
machine intelligence to empower continuous learning.

The platform consists of three distinct service levels: Secure Data Grid, LifeGraphTM, and Ecosystem.

Secure Data Grid

Securely managing, protecting, and sharing large, complex data sets cannot be done by simply exposing an interface to existing legacy systems. Such “data warehouse” models are unable to manage complex permissioning, secure and traceable data transfers, cross-system data integration, and a number of other essential functions.

A truly universal health data platform must provide end-to-end data rights management, secure data storage, an indisputable chain of custody and advanced security techniques for the data. Maintaining individual privacy throughout all levels of the platform is paramount.

BurstIQ’s Secure Data Grid addresses the specific data security, flexibility and cross-domain extensibility of a user’s data. This layer of the BurstIQ platform leverages blockchain, data cloaking, sharding and encryption services to securely manage data objects and stores. Data verification proofs are easy to share and direct access to data is easy to provide with the platform’s layered security access model. Data cloaking provides an additional layer of security that scatters and encrypts data packets across a nodal framework. The Secure Data Grid utilizes open source data management tools to ensure that data access is seamless and interoperable.

Security: Data Cloaking, Sharding and Encryption

Traditional blockchain does nothing to protect data; all data on the chain is open and transparent. In the healthcare context, this is a non-starter, as Protected Health Information (PHI) must be protected to comply with HIPAA requirements.

The BurstIQ Secure Data Grid is designed on the fundamental principle that data at rest is data at risk. It leverages cryptography and proprietary protection schemes to ensure that data is constantly in motion and encrypted at multiple layers throughout the environment. Individual shards are encrypted into secure data containers, and a multi-key management approach is used to protect against information loss and maintain strict access controls. Moreover, the platform’s patent-pending approach enables permitted access to encrypted information without requiring the typical processing overhead associated with data-at-rest protection methods. Data cloaking allows varying levels of access to be provided across temporal and physical domains, supporting multiple secured communities of interest. These elements provide security and dynamic consent capability in one platform.

Scalability & Real-Time Analytics

Scaling within traditional blockchain is already experiencing issues. According to some experts, “its highest transaction throughput is effectively capped at maximum block size divided by block interval. …Today’s representative blockchain such as Bitcoin takes 10 min or longer to confirm transactions, achieves 7 transactions/sec maximum throughput.”1 This scaling challenge is driven by two factors. First, traditional blockchain requires a proof-of-work by untrusted nodes before a block is placed into the chain. This type of latency (on the scale of minutes) is an inhibitor to high-throughput data ingestion. Second, traditional blockchain data is stored as raw files on a disk.

While this approach is helpful for portability, it makes finding any one piece of data untenably slow. The only search mechanism that is natively available is a file system search for basic string (grep) matching; there is no support for complex Boolean algebra, set operations or GIS-based queries.

The healthcare industry accounted for approximately 153 exabytes of data in 2013, and that number is expected to rise to 2,314 exabytes by 2020

BurstIQ’s proprietary BurstChainTM technology addresses both of these limitations. First, by replacing the traditional proof-of-work mechanism with a voting paradigm amongst trusted nodes and a consensus model at the persistence layer, latency is reduced to sub-second. The platform provides a frictionless data input and access layer that supports several interfaces (FHIR, HL7, XML, EDI, X12, JSON, CSV, XLSX and others) and has support for multiple transports (HTTPS, SFTP, Queue, Stream, WebSocket and others). Data can be received from multiple data sources (i.e. batch, streaming, IoT and others).

To address searchability, BurstChainTM includes an intelligent abstraction layer that supports various persistent data stores: a NoSQL-based blockchain protocol, industry standard blockchain protocols, Graph DB, traditional RDBMS, and NoSQL engines. This unique architecture allows for high-throughput scalability and near-real-time searchability, both of which are essential to support the large volumes of data generated by the healthcare industry.

In the first 12 months of operation, the BurstIQ platform processed 25 billion data points.

Immutability & Auditability

Traditional databases have no native capability to preserve changes over time to a set of data. Techniques have been developed to provide a historical view, but none have leveraged blockchain’s immutable journal and provability.

BurstChainTM is a permissioned blockchain that ensures immutability and auditability through on-chain smart contracts, timer-based events, and on-chain analytics. Smart contracts can be written with the intent of creating new assets, transferring assets, and updating assets. When a data owner updates their asset, the platform is able to preserve the traceability of the change and allow only the current version to be used within the platform. This allows the platform to perform two essential functions: update an asset without violating immutability, and provide an audited transaction trail of an asset.

Data Rights Management / Ownership

Within the BurstIQ platform, ownership of assets is strictly enforced. Data is only available through implicit access via ownership definitions at the data object level or explicit access via owner-created Consent Contract(s).

To achieve this, BurstChainTM utilizes Verified data elements built upon a Self-Aware Data Object model. The self-aware data object model couples the core data with ownership and use profiles that drive data relationships. Utilizing this approach enables the BurstChainTM to grant implicit access and rights to the data elements through data element itself rather than through a table or database.

These features, from the security mechanisms, to Big Data scaling and analytics, to immutability and auditability, to advanced data rights management, all position the BurstIQ Secure Data Grid as the only solution that meets the unique needs of the healthcare industry.