The problem Future Health solves

The Problem: The world is moving towards predictive, personal healthcare, where data is not only used to predict problems but also in clinical decision making. This requires large amounts of data, which is not readily available because of the silos of data maintained by each institution independently. Lack of trust among these institutions further complicates the issue. A common platform is required to share this data while ensuring that the control of data is with individuals producing the data. Also, since each institution already has the infrastructure for collecting and storing local data, the solution should try to leverage this existing infrastructure instead of developing something from the ground up.
Solution: Institutions will independently collect and store data locally. Individuals can authorize the transfer of data between institutions through a cryptographic method known as proxy re-encryption. Pseudo-identities and data anonymization before transfer ensures that the privacy of individuals can be maintained. The Solana blockchain is used to ensure the integrity of the transferred documents. Hash of documents is stored on the blockchain, to ensure tamper-proof transfer of documents. Documents are encrypted before the transfer, to ensure privacy. The receiving institution can only decrypt the document if the individual provides access to it. The solution is designed in such a way that it can be integrated with the existing infrastructure of institutions without much hassle.

Challenges we ran into

• Designing an architecture that focuses on privacy and immutability, but at the same time ensures authentication and data control was challenging. The solution had to be designed in multiple components, which increased the complexity of the architecture
• Limited examples of Solana smart contracts, coupled with the steep learning curve of Rust made the development of smart contracts a big challenge. Frequent interactions with the Solana dev team proved to be very useful in overcoming these hurdles
• The proxy re-encryption scheme used to design our solution is very new, which meant it had limited support in terms of languages supported. Because of this, we had to design our hospital server in python, knowing that we would need a separate server written in Node.js to support the Solana SDK.