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Add the Food and Drug Administration to the roster of health care clients lining up to work with IBM Watson. They’ll be working together to study how blockchain technology — best known for being the basis of cryptocurrency system Bitcoin — could be applied to health care.

Blockchain is meant to bring checks and balances to data, really — decentralizing data as a way to make it immutable and secure.

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IBM Watson and FDA will study how blockchain can be applied to the management of data from EHRs, clinical trials, genomics, and wearables. It’ll focus first on cancer.

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