Fujifilm has established NURA, a health checkup center focusing on cancer screening, in India and Mongolia to strengthen its health checkup service business in emerging countries. NURA has been highly praised as an initiative contributing to solving social issues in emerging countries through digital technology. It has been selected for the ‘Indo-Pacific Region Supply Chain Resilience Project’ promoted by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The project uses the Digital Trust Platform (DTPF), which employs blockchain technology to prevent data tampering and enable secure data exchange, aiming to strengthen the information supply chain. With the consent of examinees, anonymized health checkup data was securely shared with a research and analysis team in Japan. This system, utilizing AI technology to analyze the data and provide feedback to the examinees, was successfully demonstrated. In the future, we plan to develop this system further to predict disease risk based on health checkup data.
The figure below illustrates the future vision of the DTPF within the “NURA” project. This project aims to convert medical data managed by medical institutions into “data that individuals can recognize as valuable and utilize,” enabling them to “convert their own medical data into assets” by using the DTPF.
Specifically, a request for data provision is sent from a data user to a data owner (a patient), and if the owner agrees, the personal data is provided. The results of the data usage are then fed back to both the data manager and the data owner as an analysis report.
Allowing data owners (examinees) to safely and legally utilize their own medical data is expected to encourage regular health checkups, deepen their understanding of their own health conditions, and promote proactive health behaviors.
Through this initiative, we aim to realize a next-generation medical data linkage network via “NURA” and verify specific use cases.
Digital trust ensures that the information provider or legal entity is genuine and that the information has not been tampered with.
The DTPF is a multi-stakeholder participatory data-sharing platform that utilizes blockchain and other technologies to address the risks of spoofing, falsification, and alteration of information by malicious third parties. The DTPF provides an open environment where all participants can share information and collaborate based on mutual trust.
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In the healthcare area, many stakeholders are involved, including hospitals, health checkup centers, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, national governments, public administrations, and individuals who are key actors in medicine and health. Additionally, responses to issues are not limited to specific countries or regions but increasingly require global collaboration. At the same time, various types of information, including personal medical and health information, are currently fragmented and managed under different processes, systems, and national and regional regulations by each stakeholder.
In addition to providing products and services through our medical systems business, we are reinforcing the development of NURA, a health checkup center focusing on cancer screening in emerging countries, and operating health checkup centers such as Mediterrace Yokohama, a facility for Fujifilm Group employees. Therefore, global collaboration on medical health information is an important issue.
To address issues in this area, Fujifilm's DTPF is being utilized by various stakeholders to 'realize a medical and health digital twin' through global data sharing and distribution, addressing constraints such as business, systems, and national and regional regulations. We will also contribute to solving global issues by achieving overall optimization through the digital twin.
This digital trust mechanism is not limited to those provided by our company but is “based on interoperability with multiple trust platforms. ” It will be possible to use data such as medical history and PHRs across different systems while the individual data sovereign retains their own sovereignty with the trust secured.
