Cybersecurity experts want to open the hood and and test the digital ledger technology for identity and access management.

Norfolk, Virginia-based Sentara Healthcare and nearby Old Dominion University have teamed up to test the mettle of the blockchain digital ledger tool and assess its ability to protect the integrity of personal health data in the cloud.

The project involves using decentralized and permissioned blockchain to protect privacy and improve identity management. A mobile app collects data from wearable and medical devices and synchronizes it to the cloud for sharing with providers and payers.

In the project, a proof of integrity and validation is "permanently retrievable from a cloud database and is anchored to the blockchain network," said Sachin Shetty, associate professor at Old Dominion's Center for Cybersecurity Education and Research. "For scalable and performance considerations, we adopt a tree-based data processing and batching method to handle large data sets of personal health data collected and uploaded by the mobile platform."

The goal, essentially, "is to provide the ability to track and report any unauthorized access or modification to your data in the cloud," he said.

Shetty and Dan Bowden, chief information security officer at Sentara, will describe the initiative September 11 at the HIMSS and Healthcare IT News Healthcare Security Forum in Boston.