The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and IBM Watson Health have entered into a joint initiative that is aimed at leveraging the blockchain technology to define a secure, efficient and scalable exchange of health records and data.

The collaboration will work on to explore the owner medicated data from various sources like Electronic Medical Records, clinical trials, genomic data, wearables, the IoT and will initially focus on the oncology-related data, the release stated.

FDA and IBM will explore on how a blockchain framework can provide benefits to public health by supporting important use cases for information exchange across data types like clinical trials and ‘real world’ evidence data. The new insights from the collaboration can potentially lead to new biomedical discoveries

“The healthcare industry is undergoing significant changes due to the vast amounts of disparate data being generated. Blockchain technology provides a highly secure, decentralized framework for data sharing that will accelerate innovation throughout the industry,” Shahram Ebadollahi, Vice President for Innovations and Chief Science Officer at IBM Watson Health, said.

The partnership will also address new methods to leverage a large amount of data in present biomedical and healthcare industries. IBM brings its extensive expertise in blockchain technology and will work on to define and build the technological solution for a scalable as well as decentralized data sharing ecosystem.

A recent paper titled ‘Healthcare rallies for blockchains’ was released by IBM Institute for Business, which is based on a survey of about 200 healthcare executives. The paper found that over seven in ten industry leaders foresee the highest benefits of blockchain in healthcare to result to managing clinical trial records, regulatory compliance, and medical/health records.

The agreement between both the parties will last for two years and they have agreed to share initial research findings this year.