Sec. 9. Blockchain pilot program for hospital data security for coccidioidomycosis research
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/bill/115/hr/6562/ih/section-9A research copy — for the controlling text, always check the official state or federal source. Not legal advice.
Part A of title IV of the Public Health Service Act ( 42 U.S.C. 281 et seq.) is amended by adding at the end the following new section: The Director of NIH shall carry out a pilot program to conduct, support, and facilitate auditable research on coccidioidomycosis (commonly referred to as Valley Fever ). In carrying out such program, the Director shall— award a grant to an eligible entity to install a blockchain on the servers of, or otherwise provide blockchain services to, the National Institutes of Health, and provide support with respect to such a blockchain, which shall contain public, unalterable data which includes every query made through the procedure established under subsection (c), as well as the identity of the individual who asked such a question, without disclosing the results of such queries; award a grant to an eligible entity— to provide to not less than 3 qualified hospitals qualified software; and to provide customer service to each such hospital with respect to such qualified software or any associated service; provide to such qualified hospitals any necessary hardware in accordance with subsection (e); and award grants to eligible entities to test the cybersecurity of such qualified hospitals by attempting to attack simulated data on the servers of such hospitals.
The Director of NIH shall determine whether an entity is eligible to receive a grant under this section and shall select hospitals to be qualified hospitals for purposes of this section. An entity seeking a grant under this section, and a hospital seeking to be so selected, shall submit to the Director of NIH an application in such form and manner and containing such information as the Director of NIH may specify. The Director of NIH shall establish, for purposes of allowing researchers to process data from a qualified hospital’s servers pursuant to this section, a procedure to determine— who can ask queries of the servers; which data the hospital must include on such servers; and which questions may be asked of such servers, and what form of de-identification of the servers’ data is required to ensure privacy.
Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this section, the Director of NIH shall publish in the Federal Register a request for proposals for grants under paragraphs (1), (2), and
(4)of subsection (a). The Director of NIH shall, in carrying out subsection (a)(3), provide to qualified hospitals hardware, including computer servers, sufficient to support qualified software. As a condition on the receipt of a computer server under paragraph (1), a qualified hospital shall agree not to use the qualified software on the server to store data from patients of the hospital until the Director of NIH determines that testing performed pursuant to subsection (a)(4) has determined that simulated data used in such software could not be extracted from the hospital’s servers. In this section: The term blockchain means software that uses a distributed digital ledger of cryptographically signed transactions that are grouped into blocks, each of which— is cryptographically linked to the previous block after validation and undergoing a consensus decision; and when added as a new block, makes any older blocks more difficult to modify and is replicated across all copies of the ledger within the relevant network, with any conflicts in such blocks resolved automatically using established rules. The term qualified hospital means a hospital that is located in a region in which coccidioidomycosis is endemic. The term qualified software means software that uses secure multiparty encrypted computing to allow researchers to perform computations on encrypted data supplied by qualified hospitals. The term secure multiparty encrypted computing means a form of cryptography in which parties can jointly compute a function of inputs while keeping those inputs private from each other, and from all other parties, such as multiparty homomorphic encryption, threshold encryption, and secure multiparty computation. There are authorized to be appropriated to carry out this section $5,000,000 for fiscal year 2020, to remain available until expended. .
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Sec. 9
Blockchain pilot program for hospital data security for coccidioidomycosis research
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