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Open the New York Times continuous survey of coronavirus cases on US college campuses and the picture looks bleak: As of November 5, more than 252,000 cases had been confirmed in 1,600 colleges nationwide.
The spread of the infection, combined with a policy at best incompetent and, at worst, cynical and exploitative towards students and university staff has led university communities to face rigorous quarantines in unsafe housing or to be sent home summarily. Meanwhile, students are expected to pay the bill for the full cost of their college tuition.
With more than 2,500 cases reported as of November 5, Arizona State University is currently among the hardest-hit colleges in the country: just over 50 colleges have reported 1,000 cases over the course of the pandemic, according to the New York Times. To keep that in perspective, it’s worth noting that ASU is one of the largest public universities in the United States, which makes dealing with the public health crisis much more difficult.
The university has now taken a new step to tackle the crisis on the test-and-trace technology front and requires its 74,500 on-site students and 12,400 employees to use a blockchain-based app daily in an effort to gain control over the viral. epidemic.
ASU is now using the “HealthCheck” health testing and status app, designed by Safe Health Systems, or SHS, a Mayo Clinic partner. Hedera Hashgraph has entered into an agreement with SHS to verify and log events in real time using distributed log technology.
HealthCheck is powered by a digital health platform called SAFE, developed during the Mayo Clinic and ASU Health Care MedTech Accelerator program. The platform generates digital health IDs and a verifiable log of all events, which, for HealthCheck, will be verified and archived using the Hedera consent service.
The use of these technologies aims to ensure that sensitive health data is kept private and that data communication is accurate and reliable. On the latter point, the HealthCheck announcement explicitly notes that this will be important for coordination with private health insurance companies. In a statement, SHS CEO Ken Mayer said:
“We need far better information on COVID-19 cases in various populations to be able to diagnose, treat and make smart choices about how we approach the community response to the virus, with less of a ‘peanut butter’ approach. . Only with this kind of information, shared between suppliers in an intelligent, secure and tamper-proof way, can we start moving forward. “
A handful of US colleges have had remarkable success with launching internal surveillance testing programs that randomly test students, whether or not they show symptoms. These programs have placed less emphasis on data privacy, but their ambitious approach to random, diffuse testing has ensured that these colleges expect to keep learning in person during the fall and spring semesters.
As a Cointelegraph report made clear, privacy concerns remain, even for blockhain solutions like HealthCheck, due to their data integrations and partnerships with external medical labs. Cointelegraph asked for comment from Hedera Hashgraph to further investigate the terms of these partnerships and their potential implications for the use of downstream data.
