Croydon Health Services NHS Trust (CUH) is a large integrated organization located in South West London. There are over 380,000 patient populations under the care of the Trust, with an annual budget of over £260 Million. In Croydon health services there are two separate health care systems under one roof: the acute hospital trust and community services, including primary care. With the move to go paperless, the medical records are rendered digital within both domains. At present, this has culminated in two differing electronic systems: Cerner for the acute hospital and EMIS for primary care.
The NHS use case within HEIR project would be based on the following two technical investigations:
Blockchain of patient data - Dummy patient data will be created utilizing blockchain technology. These files would be tracked to see if audit trail and erasure could be done and audited to confirm reliance on data ownership. If successful, then it may be able to demonstrate not only secure access to patient files by authorized end users, but also enable the patient to have ownership as well as clarity on how their data has been used and if so, by whom
Testing intrusions - The NHS system can be attacked via intrusions as well as, more commonly email phishing scams and attachments containing viruses. The WannaCry virus was one such badly attack. It is envisioned, that implementing the HEIR system on the dummy servers, the planned intrusions can be tested on mirrored systems to affirm the ability of the system, utilizing deep machine learning and AI, to mitigate against attacks and improve onthe current NHS digital architecture
HEIR will boost the Croydon NHS IT system in respect to the:
- secure access/transfer of patient files
- patients’ ownership to their health data history
- threat and attacks identification and analysis
- big data management and control
