PROJECT TITLE

CUREX: seCUre and pRivate hEalth data eXchange

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

The vision of CUREX is to safeguard patient privacy and increase their trust in the currently vulnerable critical healthcare information infrastructures, especially in cases where data is exchanged among healthcare stakeholders within any business, operational and systemic cross-border environment. By leveraging novel methods on ontological health data modelling, vulnerability discovery, threat intelligence, cybersecurity, and privacy risk assessment methodologies, and state-of-the art in blockchain technologies for health data, CUREX aims at enabling secure and authorised sensitive health data exchange. CUREX  empowers healthcare institutions to efficiently, accurately and effectively assess and address their cybersecurity and privacy risks associated with health data exchange and enhances their cybersecurity and privacy awareness among the organisation personnel. CUREX  offers a secure-by-design business network based on the MHMD blockchain technologies and software that provides accountability and auditability functionalities aiming to increase trust among hospitals and care centres. CUREX  provides GDPR compliant tools and applications targeted towards healthcare professionals and individuals, offering a secure and private-by-design environment to access and exchange data.

The CUREX Platform is composed of a number of components (tools, applications, blockchain). These components, as well as their interdependencies, are shown in below, which depicts the basic system architecture to be further refined in the course of the project. The integrated CUREX Platform relies on a flexible and agile architecture comprising of four discrete layers:

• The Asset Discovery layer, which involves the tools and methodologies which consider the mapping of data, technical and human resources into ontological models.
• The Risk Management layer, which involves the analysis and the generation of quantifiable risks that consider both cybersecurity and privacy, and the proposition of optimal safeguards and cyber hygiene enhancing techniques based on decision support systems.
• The Trust Enhancing layer, which includes the deployment of a business consensus-based blockchain that stores compiled risks reports from the previous layers and integrates the CUREX tools and end-user applications into a fully GDPR compliant platform.

8BELLS ROLE

8BELLS participates in the definition of the overall CUREX system architecture and contributes to the definition of the KPIs used for evaluation and assessment of the final outcomes, the integrated prototypes and the pilot demonstrations. Furthermore, 8BELLS develops innovative business models that can be used as revenue generators, taking into account the broader digitisation of the health sector and performs cost/complexity assessments of the various technology options, identifying who has to invest and who will benefit commercially.

Moreover, 8BELLS helps to define and apply best practices for adopting appropriate privacy and security policies in the health sector and actively participates in European activities relating to cybersecurity with the objective of providing input towards CUREX programme implementation, standards, policy and regulatory activities.