Today Briya announced an $11.5 million Series A funding led by Team 8, including existing investors Insight Partners, Amiti Ventures and Innocare Health Investment. Briya enables hospitals to share de-identified health data with clinical researchers. It’s possible to track the data provenance by logging information sharing using blockchain.
Software developed by the Israeli-American firm is already in use in Europe and Israel. Now the company wants to use the funding to get traction in the United States.
“By implementing Briya’s data platform, we can now quickly access relevant clinical and radiological data from various sources in mere seconds,” said Dr. Jawed Nawabi, a radiology specialist at the Institute of Neuroradiology at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. “This has not only increased our efficiency in clinical research but also improved our collaboration within our international research network, thanks to a decentralized approach.”
Health data is heavily protected by legislation because of the privacy implications. With the increasing deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, there’s an urgent need to access hospital data to enable academic institutions and pharmaceutical firms to invent new treatments. Briya anonymizes the healthcare data before it is shared.
“Privacy and speed are top priorities when it comes to digital health and Briya provides both the confidentiality and fast queries simultaneously,” said Janet Meiling Wang-Roveda, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona. “It is the most comprehensive decentralized data platform we have seen in recent years, helping us establish smart contracts to share data and reduce data storage costs.”
Tracking health data with blockchain
Briya is certainly not the only organization in this space. Pharmaledger, a European consortium with several drug companies such as Pfizer and Novartis, also plans to address trusted data sharing for clinical trials.
Equideum Health (formerly ConsenSys Health) has targeted this area for years. One of its solutions has a slightly different approach. It’s interested in self sovereign identity, so it focuses on sharing data from wearable devices. It partnered with Nokia Bell Labs for research around cognitive augmentation.
