The application of distributed autonomous organization governance mechanisms to civic medical data management

Cunningham, James and Davies, Nigel and Devaney, Sarah and Holm, Søren and Harding, Mike and Neumann, Victoria and Ainsworth, John (2024) The application of distributed autonomous organization governance mechanisms to civic medical data management. IET Blockchain. ISSN 2634-1573

Abstract

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have emerged as a novel governance mechanism that operates through distributed ledgers and smart contracts, enabling members to direct an organization's actions. The widespread adoption of DAOs has occurred in response to their utility in managing emergent semi‐structured projects and has led to the development of various innovative governance mechanisms. The mechanisms employed by DAOs has the potential to be generalized beyond their core financial domain to a wide range of use cases. In the medical field the use of blockchain and DAOs can provide secure and transparent access to medical data, while ensuring patient privacy. Civic access to medical data is a growing area of interest, where individuals have control over their own medical data and can share it with healthcare providers, researchers, and other stakeholders. DAOs can facilitate this civic access, enabling individuals to share their data securely and selectively with authorized parties for research and other purposes. This paper explores the use of DAOs to medical data sharing, with a focus on ownership, governance, and transaction models. An application framework and API that enables the deployment of DAO‐like organizations is derived and this approach is applied to the patient‐centric management of medical data.