Olufunke Akande Charts Bold Future for Global Health Data With Blockchain and AI

By Tosin Clegg

As the global demand for secure and collaborative health data systems grows, data analytics and information technology specialist Olufunke Akande has highlighted the urgent need to integrate blockchain with federated learning to safeguard sensitive health information.

In a detailed paper, Akande explains how privacy-preserving data analytics can transform governmental health information systems. Her research, “Integrating Blockchain with Federated Learning for Privacy-Preserving Data Analytics Across Decentralized Governmental Health Information Systems”, explores how these cutting-edge technologies can solve long-standing problems of privacy, interoperability and trust in public health networks.

She argues that while health systems worldwide are increasingly digitized, many still struggle with fragmented data, inconsistent standards and reluctance to share information because of privacy concerns. Her work offers a roadmap for bridging these gaps and enables governments to collaborate on disease surveillance, outbreak prediction and chronic illness monitoring without compromising patient confidentiality.

The framework she proposes combines the decentralized model training of federated learning with the immutable ledger and smart contracts of blockchain. In practice, hospitals, clinics and public health agencies can train AI models locally, share only encrypted updates and validate contributions on a secure blockchain, ensuring compliance with HIPAA, GDPR and other global data regulations.

Beyond its technical merit, the paper highlights Akande’s vision of building trust across institutions. She identifies legacy infrastructure, lack of interoperability and institutional skepticism as barriers, and proposes modular designs that support HL7 and FHIR health data standards. Her framework also accommodates real-time updates and dynamic participation so that even smaller or rural health entities can benefit.

Akande’s ability to merge advanced technologies with practical solutions reflects a broader career shaped by more than a decade of experience in software development, system administration and IT engineering. At Felbry College School of Nursing she managed the migration of student data to a new information system, deepening her understanding of data governance and security at scale. At Franklin University she refined her expertise in information assurance, big data analytics and applied database management and later applied these skills to research projects aligned with global priorities in digital health.

Her professional portfolio includes ambitious personal projects such as a healthcare data integration platform aimed at real-time data sharing and predictive analytics for public health. This initiative foreshadowed the themes of her blockchain and federated learning research and underscored her commitment to improving public health outcomes, reducing costs and expanding accessibility.

In her paper Akande uses simulations across municipal, regional and national health departments to show how her framework can deliver results. For example, in outbreak prediction she demonstrates that combining federated learning with blockchain reduces delays in model convergence while maintaining strict compliance with data protection regulations. The potential impact extends to chronic disease surveillance and population-level risk stratification, which are essential tools for governments confronting the rising burden of non-communicable diseases.

Her work is not limited to academic or institutional settings. At Joshua’s Generation Church, where she volunteers as a technical media coordinator, Akande has applied similar principles of security, automation and accessibility to digital platforms, proving that her solutions thrive both in high-level institutional environments and at the grassroots.

Colleagues describe her as a bridge builder in technology, someone who understands advanced programming, database systems and networks while also appreciating the human and institutional factors that drive adoption. This is evident in her insistence on automating access control and compliance enforcement through smart contracts while taking into account the hesitations of institutions concerned about reputational risk and intellectual property leakage.

Akande’s global outlook is firmly rooted in her Nigerian beginnings. From 2009 to 2015 she worked with the National Universities Commission and the Nigerian Research and Education Network, eventually rising to Lead Network Operations Engineer. There she coordinated with universities, research institutions and government stakeholders to build one of Nigeria’s largest high-speed research and education networks. She led projects in network security, disaster recovery and scalable infrastructure, experience that laid the foundation for her later work in blockchain, federated learning and secure health data systems.

The impact of her research is already influencing policy discussions on digital public health infrastructures. By offering a scalable and trustworthy model that respects national sovereignty, Akande provides governments with a blueprint for twenty-first century collaboration that does not force institutions to choose between security and innovation.