Leading Researcher Prof. John Fox Joins Hands with Seele to Empower Smart Medicine with Blockchain
Prof. Fox is a leading scholar in artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science research and has been working in the field of medical information technology for nearly 40 years. After receiving his doctorate from Cambridge University Professor Fox was a postdoctoral fellow with AI founders Allen Newell and Herbert Simon at Carnegie Mellon University & cognitive psychology pioneer Ulric Neisser at Cornell University. After returning to the UK he established a research program on clinical decision-making with the UK Medical Research Council and subsequently became a principal scientist at Cancer Research UK where he ran an interdisciplinary laboratory working on theory, technology and applications of AI in biomedicine. In 2007 he moved to Oxford University to set up the COSSAC (Cognitive Science and Systems Engineering) program with Edinburgh University and a clinical informatics incubator at the Royal Free Hospital in London.
John and his team were awarded the 20th anniversary Gold Medal of the European Federation of Medical Informatics (“Laureate Prize”) and is a life fellow of the European Society for Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour. He was founding editor of The Knowledge Engineering Review (Cambridge University Press) and has led several commercial start-ups to develop expert systems and other AI technologies in healthcare: Expertech 1986; InferMed 1999 (acquired by the global medical publisher Elsevier in 2015), and Deontics Ltd in 2014.
Seele collaboration
Prof. Fox and Seele have worked together on a number of foundational and application projects and they are currently collaborating on applying Seele’s blockchain and smart contract technology to medical research and clinical service management.
Prof. Fox recently participated in Seele’s London roadshow which reviewed the pain points of the traditional medical service model, discussed the important role of blockchain and smart contract technology in the medical field, and discussed applying blockchain technology to medical decision making, data tracking and smart service systems.
Blockchain technology can be applied to the medical field in many ways:
1. Security of personal data. Blockchain technology will provide services for individual professionals and organizations to share patient data securely, and allow medical research institutions to collect, monitor and analyse medical data securely, reliably and safely. It will allow sensitive data in clinical trial applications to be shared consistent with rigorous privacy and ethical requirements.
2. Smart contracts and medical care. Blockchain can provide individual patients with high-integrity medical services, covering medical data acquisition and analysis, risk assessment and management, clinical decision-making and care planning and workflow management. At the higher organizational and health service provider level it can provide more secure, higher-quality information analysis services, expenditure control, resource optimization, medical learning and analytics, and many other applications.
3. Multidisciplinary and distributed clinical teams. In the decentralized, information-sharing model that is inherent to blockchain, doctors and other healthcare providers will be able to work together and share their knowledge to optimize individual care plans and manage them over time.
4. Artificial intelligence and knowledge engineering. Seele’s blockchain and smart contract technology can be applied to the medical AI field to help conduct clinical research and routine care. It will provide a platform for clinical decision making (clinical investigation, diagnosis, etc.), management of care (treatment, workflow, monitoring, etc.), and particularly distributed services and knowledge sharing.
Prof. Fox will collaborate with Seele to help accelerate development of these and other use cases for blockchain technology, and to promote and advise on implementation of large-scale blockchain applications in healthcare and other fields.
