IBM’s Watson Health division has secured a two-year research initiative with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), to explore the use of blockchain technologies in managing healthcare data. While blockchain is much-hyped, and viewed with a decent amount of skepticism by the wider IT industry, it has a transformative potential in any field in which data integrity is more important than data privacy. The blockchain is the component that underpins the cryptocurrency bitcoin, and acts as a distributed ledger of all transactions made – meaning that it is virtually impossible to tamper with a transaction or defraud someone via the mechanisms inherent in the currency. It’s pretty cool. What IBM and the FDA are going to explore is the…