Student, faculty publish article on blockchain in biomedical journal
COPHS Staff |
Tom Wilson, a fourth-year student in the dual Pharm.D. and MHCI program from Columbia, Tennessee, and Dr. Kevin Clauson, associate professor in the health care informatics and pharmacy programs, published on article on blockchain technology titled “Geospatial Blockchain: Promises, Challenges and Scenarios in Health and Healthcare” in the peer-reviewed biomedical journal International Journal of Health Geographics.
Click here to see the complete article by Wilson and Clauson.
The article, Wilson’s first published piece, provides an accessible but technically sound explanation of blockchain (the secure database technology behind Bitcoin) and how it relates to opportunities in health care and health geographics, said Clauson.
The article, published in July, capped off a complete school year of Wilson’s academic accomplishments regarding blockchain technology.
Wilson was one of six students nationwide to be accepted into the Stanford University Medicine X Emerging Leader Program, allowing him to attend Stanford MedX, the university’s premier program focusing on how emerging technologies will advance health care while enabling patients to be active participants in their own care.
At the MedX conference, Wilson was able to gain insight on blockchain technology, artificial technology and machine learning and how best to implement these powerful tools in the health care system.
He also attended the Distributed Health Conference and Code Camp in Nashville in 2017, the first conference held in the world on blockchain technology in health care. Three Lipscomb students, including Wilson, participated in the Distributed Health Hackathon, using blockchain technology to create VacVerify, a secure database system for vaccination records, and later presented their work to all Lipscomb’s student pharmacists.
Wilson says he would like to practice in digital health and health care informatics upon graduation. “Some options I have been thinking about involve big data analysis for patient-outcomes research and health-system development,” he said.