The Alliance for Clinical Research Excellence and Safety (ACRES), announced today a 10-year exclusive agreement with EXOCHAIN CORP to provide blockchain protocols as infrastructure to verify the secure identity of patients and doctors participating in clinical trials and enhance all aspects of clinical research and practice.
ACRES is a global non-profit multi-stakeholder alliance with more than 140 strategic allies worldwide. Their shared mission is to build, implement and maintain an integrated, comprehensive global system for clinical research that is effective, innovative and ethical.
A significant challenge to this goal is securing the health data of patients participating in clinical trials, a necessary step for its utilization and sharing amongst researchers and healthcare providers. EXOCHAIN’s new blockchain protocol addresses this challenge.
As Greg Koski, ACRES President and co-founder noted, “Precision medicine and personalized medicine is the future, where evidence-driven practice is integrated with, and informed by, high-quality research. Done correctly, this approach requires enterprise-scale access to information from millions of patients in a manner that ensures secure identity and access management across locations and generations. Innovative application of blockchain technology, as ACRES is now doing with EXOCHAIN, provides the key to the success of this new paradigm.”
EXOCHAIN CEO and co-founder, Bob Stewart, who also serves as ACRES CTO and CISO, explains, “We are excited to work with the ACRES BlueCloud network to implement ACRES-guided standards for effectively designing and conducting clinical trials, standards which are designed to improve patient outcomes by delivering the right care, at the right time, and which require information derived from analyses of massive sets of shared data. Success of this approach depends on trust, accessibility, and immutability of shared data and transparency. This is a perfect use case for EXOCHAIN’s LYNK utility token—enabling secure lifetime and transgenerational medical record sharing between providers and patients and then, their progeny.”
To start, EXOCHAIN will integrate its new blockchain protocol to enable secure identity and access management for the BlueCloud.net collaborative networking platform that provides ACRES universal interface for interactions among all stakeholders in the clinical research and healthcare enterprise, currently with more than 1.3 million users.
The new LYNK token-based blockchain protocol developed by EXOCHAIN is also well suited to support many other secure transactions critical to the clinical research and healthcare environment, including adverse event reporting and adjudication, remote study monitoring and regulatory oversight, as well as other highly-regulated endeavors in which secure and trackable data-transactions are essential.
Koski added, “We at ACRES are both excited and grateful for all that Bob Stewart and EXOCHAIN bring to this partnership and vision, including a significant contribution from EXOCHAIN to ACRES upon execution of our partnership agreement”.
EXOCHAIN co-founder Major Dan Winschel, APA-C, a former Special Forces medic, who is currently a physician’s assistant for Veterans Affairs said, “EXOCHAIN believes in the vision and mission of ACRES, and we intend to support it as vigorously as we can. This is the beginning of a special relationship and we are proud to be part of the ACRES unique mission, especially in support of Task Force Dagger Foundation’s Operation Restore.”
Stewart will be announcing and presenting details of the new EXOCHAIN LYNK protocol and the ACRES partnership at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, Jan 18-19, at the James L. Knight Center. Follow the events live via Twitter using hashtags #EXOCHAINLYNK #BTCMiami and #TNABC.
The Alliance for Clinical Research Excellence and Safety (ACRES) today announced the launch of ACRES BlueCloud™, the first phase implementation of a shared multi-user interface to allow sponsors, CROs, regulatory agencies, funding agencies and IRBs to access millions of verifiable professional experience and training credentials, enabling long-sought sharing and mutual recognition of those credentials by multiple stakeholders.
The technology also provides a global integration platform through which stakeholders can seamlessly access and deploy already established technology solutions and collaborative data warehouses to support a global system for high-performance Accountable Research™.
Made possible by a multi-million dollar technologies and services pledge from ACRES’ strategic ally HealthCarePoint, a Texas-based healthcare and clinical research networking-technology corporation, ACRES BlueCloud™ provides much needed and desired capabilities for effortlessly interconnecting parties across the global clinical research ecosystem.
“We are happy to provide ACRES BlueCloud™ as part of our common mission to improve efficiency, quality and transparency across this endeavor, benefiting patients and care givers worldwide”, stated Al O. Pacino, president of HCP, “By donating this technology, we can very substantially help ACRES realize its goal to build a collaborative global system for clinical research.” Pacino is also ACRES’ Vice-President for Collaborative Network Development.
HealthCarePoint is among several technology companies and standards organizations comprising ACRES’ global Technology Consortium, working to integrate critical technology solutions from multiple providers into a comprehensive shared, universal interface supporting collaboration and interoperability among key stakeholders across the clinical research enterprise.
“There is much talk these days about portals and technology solutions to promote safety, quality, efficiency and collaboration in clinical research”, noted Greg Koski, ACRES president and CEO. “Actually, many solutions are already available and proven, but we need a system enabling them to work together. Rather than costly building from scratch, ACRES is leveraging existing technologies through a shared integration platform. ACRES Blue Cloud™ is a major first-step in this direction and we are very grateful to HealthCarePoint for making it possible.”
Rollout of the ACRES Blue Cloud™ platform will begin immediately by providing the technology free of charge to clinical research sites worldwide, thereby extending and leveraging the existing global network of nearly three-quarter million current BlueCloud™ users from some 60,000 healthcare and research-related organizations worldwide. The network’s single sign-on interface will allow sites to connect with sponsors, CROs, ethics committees (IRBs) and other stakeholders through a unified platform, sharing critical professional and operational information, such as GCP training certifications and other professional credentials. As other provider technologies integrate with the shared platform through application programming interfaces, commonly known as APIs, additional functionality will be added.
Daniel O’Connor, president and chief business officer of California-based InnovoCommerce, a leading provider of secure cloud-based collaboration solutions for the life science industry, enthusiastically greeted the announcement. “This is a milestone for the drug development enterprise. Global availability of a common platform allowing all players to connect and share information, which also enables access to and interoperability of technologies from multiple providers and users, is huge. ACRES vision of a shared integrating platform, as opposed to a single proprietary platform, is the foundation for a much needed global system, one that is taking shape before our eyes—this is real progress, and all of us at InnovoCommerce are proud to be part of it.”
