Clinical trials are all about collecting trustworthy data that demonstrate safety and efficacy. Large trials can collected over a million data points.
I personally see a lot of value in creating cryptographic hashes of these data points and documents, and registering them in an immutable database. This would prove that the data/document is not altered at a later time, and increases its trustworthiness.
However, I see quite a few commenters here who do not see that value. For you I have the following question:
"How would you prove that a data point or document has not been altered"?
(No, this cannot be done by the FDA or Clinicaltrials.gov)
Please bear in mind that researchers could indeed use fake data in these cryptographic hashes. But at the moment it is collected, they would have no idea what they should alter because they are double-blinded. The results and implications only become clear when analysing the data after de-blinding. So proving the validity prior to analysis is where the value lays.
I personally see a lot of value in creating cryptographic hashes of these data points and documents, and registering them in an immutable database. This would prove that the data/document is not altered at a later time, and increases its trustworthiness.
However, I see quite a few commenters here who do not see that value. For you I have the following question:
"How would you prove that a data point or document has not been altered"?
(No, this cannot be done by the FDA or Clinicaltrials.gov)
Please bear in mind that researchers could indeed use fake data in these cryptographic hashes. But at the moment it is collected, they would have no idea what they should alter because they are double-blinded. The results and implications only become clear when analysing the data after de-blinding. So proving the validity prior to analysis is where the value lays.