Safeguarding Healthcare Data in Cross-Departmental Projects

Securing data for machine learning to discover novel disease insights



Summary
Medical and healthcare research institutions use AI and Machine Learning to support discovery projects that often involve cross-departmental data sharing. Given the sensitivity of healthcare data, these projects require a careful balance of data privacy, analytical precision, and regulatory compliance.

Privacy-enhancing technologies such as statutory pseudonymization and synthetic data offer a solution to preserve data privacy and utility.
Challenge
Medical research projects involve the use of highly sensitive data that must be shared across multiple departments. Ensuring data privacy, preventing unauthorized re-linking, and complying with regulatory guidelines are paramount, all while maintaining the data's utility for machine learning and analytical purposes.
Solution
Anonos Data Embassy offers a comprehensive suite of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) designed to safeguard sensitive healthcare data while preserving its utility. These techniques can be meticulously tailored to suit each stage of data processing and the specific needs of the project:

  • Statutory Pseudonymization: This technique protects both direct and indirect identifiers in the data by using dynamic tokens to prevent unauthorized re-linking. This approach maintains the data's analytical utility and allows for the reconnection of data to the original records, but only by authorized personnel under controlled conditions.
A diagram of Variant Twins technology, demonstrating the process of separating data value from personally-identifiable information through record-level dynamic pseudonymization to ensure insurance data privacy.
  • Synthetic data: A significant challenge in many research projects is the scarcity of sufficient data to formulate balanced and unbiased hypotheses. Synthetic data technology addresses this by producing artificial data records to complement and balance original pseudonymized datasets. This approach not only augments the dataset with anonymized synthetic healthcare data but also empowers scientists to conduct comprehensive exploratory analyses without compromising privacy.
Synthetic Data Augmentation
Results
Regulatory Compliance Successfully meet compliance with global and local data protection regulations, mitigating the risk of penalties.
Operational Efficiency Reduce healthcare data preparation and compliance validation times, streamlining the overall research process.
Accelerate Time-to-Insight Streamlined data security and privacy procedures enable a faster time-to-insight for researchers, leading to quicker hypothesis validation.