Unlocking Medical Research: Data Lake launches Consentify — the first DeSci patient recruitment platform!

6 min readDec 19, 2023

The time has finally come for us to announce what we have been working on for the past months: brace yourself as we introduce Consentify, the first blockchain-based patient recruitment & consent management platform that will democratize medical research!

📚 Background and context

Unlocking the potential of medical data is crucial, yet the current landscape of patient recruitment and data access is plagued by inefficiencies, is intransparent or even unethical. The fragmentation within research organizations, each building its own hermetic referral network, leaves the majority of healthcare providers excluded. Researchers grapple with friction in tracking referrals, compensation, and ensuring participant engagement, leading to a scarcity of participants in research projects. Fear, fueled by compliance and data privacy concerns, deters many providers from participating in patient recruitment programs for data acquisition.

As a consequence, nearly 80% of clinical studies experience delays, and the cost of patient recruitment comprises a staggering 40% of overall clinical trial expenses. With recruitment costs ranging up to $5,000 per patient, the global challenge of patient recruitment for clinical trials and data acquisition has surged to a $100 billion problem.

Data Lake was founded in 2019 by Wojciech Sierocki and Ligia Kornowska, two Medical Doctors and entrepreneurs who felt the need to revolutionize the antiquated system of patients’ data collection to fully unlock the potential of medical research and save lives.

Since then, Data Lake has engaged with esteemed institutions like the EU Commission and collaborated with industry leaders, including top 10 global pharma companies, medical AI startups, researchers, medical professionals, various healthcare entities and DeSci projects. As we continuously gathered feedback about the problem of medical data collection, we changed our approach to solving the problem several times, always focussing on ensuring transparency and patient centricity.

In the initial phase, Data Lake empowered the Polish “Podaruj Dane” (Donate Your Data) Foundation, providing the necessary technology to successfully collect tens of thousands of consents from Polish patients — an initiative that continues to make a positive impact today.

Then, earlier in 2023, we understood that no matter how hard we tried, our efforts to unlock medical data by ourselves were never going to be enough to feed the global demand for data needed for the research of new drugs and treatments. In pursuit of a more impactful approach we decided to implement more decentralized and inclusive approach.

We decided to improve our platform to collect consents for medical data and to make it available for and customizable by thousands of researchers, start-ups and pharma companies worldwide. We also made so that this new platform integrates our token $LAKE.

Today, after 6 months since the day we took that decision, we are proud to unveil Consentify.

✅ Introducing: Consentify- the first blockchain-based global DeSci patient recruitment & consent management platform.

Consentify is poised to spur innovation and advance medical research, serving as a crucial tool for the data economy emerging from the latest EU legislation, such as the Data Governance Act (DGA), which entered into force in September 2023. This legislation is designed to establish a robust counterbalance to the dominance of global big data platforms, fostering a more equitable and responsible data landscape.

It is a platform where researchers can publish their trials and healthcare providers can be rewarded for referring patients. The platform uses Polygon PoS Blockchain Network for tracking and managing patients’ consents and operations on data.

In essence, any researcher can use Consentify to publish their research project, create forms and surveys with inclusion criteria to collect data and set a bounty in $LAKE tokens for those who help them in reaching the quota of data needed for the research to begin.

By using Consentify, researchers can track patients enrollment in real time time while remaining in a GDPR-compliant environment that can be easily audited thanks to the logs of the system and consent statuses stored on the blockchain.

Healthcare providers, such as clinics and labs, can browse research projects available, check the inclusion criteria, evaluate the bounties and rewards and finally — collect signatures from patients who are interested in being involved in a particular research.

When it comes to the patients who physically go to their local hospital or clinic, they can decide to contribute to a medical research by consenting in our platform on the mobile device of their trusted healthcare provider. Needless to say patients can manage their consent, control how their data is used, and potentially be rewarded with a $LAKE token bounty, if a researcher decides to set up one. At Data Lake, we have always believed that unlocking medical data should never come at the expenses of patients, who should instead be able to contribute to medical research in a transparent and ethical environment that rewards them for their efforts.

💪 A new usecase for the LAKE token

With Consentify, LAKE rises as the token for researchers to finally be able to reach patients and onboard them into their research. We envision LAKE as a gateway token, enabling the participants of the traditional science sector to join DeSci, the movement that is making science and biotech more efficient, accessible and decentralized.

Let’s delve deeper in its new use cases:

Access token

To filter access to Consentify, we will require researchers to hold a certain amount of $LAKE to become able to use our platform as admin (license fee) and build their forms and surveys to collect consents. Researchers may also be required to keep the balance of LAKE above a certain threshold to be able to use the platform and publish studies. With the use of LAKE, small entities such as start-ups and researchers will have access to our platform at minimum cost, that would strengthen our push to democratize medical research through DeSci philosophy.

With time, several access levels mediated through the LAKE token could also be used for unlocking additional functionalities of the platform such as analytics, BI or better visibility of research to healthcare providers and patients. Researchers may also be required to deposit $LAKE token into their accounts upon registration.

Bounties

Researchers may be able to set up token-based bounties and rewards for healthcare providers for including patients into the trials and for patients for joining the research. That way, researchers might be able in real time boost engagement and recruitment into their trials.

Benefit Panel

The token may also be used in the Benefit Panel of the system. There, researchers can set up different benefits for providers (e.g. educational content) or patients (e.g. patient support programs), where they may be able to exchange their tokens for multiple different benefits and bounties. This way, thanks to the token incentive mechanisms, researchers could supercharge their recruitment strategies in the future and make their research attractive for providers to work with.

💥 What comes next? Try out Consentify now!

The official Public Launch of Consentify for researchers is programmed for January 2024.

In the meantime, we would like our greatest supporters to participate to the private beta of the platform and test Consentify themselves now! Starting today, anyone who holds at least 10,000 LAKE tokens in their wallets can fill a google form to apply to become a Beta Tester. Chosen testers will be rewarded with individual awards estimated at typically between $50 and $2000 depending on the quality of the feedback provided.

If you want to jump on this opportunity do not hesitate to fill in this google form: https://forms.gle/Rz8knYr3yGKiqAKx7.

🔎 About Data Lake

Data Lake has built Consentify, a decentralized recruitment platform that helps researchers find the right patients. We are the leading Decentralized Science (DeSci) project using blockchain for consent and data access management. We are also using our native token $LAKE for incentivizing healthcare providers and patients as well as to enable access to our unique technology.

So far, we’ve worked with 2 out of 10 biggest pharmaceutical companies globally and delivered data for multiple AI development projects.

We are founded by two medical doctors and entrepreneurs, both Forbes 30 under 30. Our team members are top experts in cybersec, and data privacy laws.