A secure architecture for exploring patient-level databases from distributed institutions

Abstract

One of the main goals of clinical studies consists of identifying diseases' causes and improving the efficacy of medical treatments. Sometimes, the reduced number of participants is a limiting factor for these studies, leading researchers to organise multi-centre studies. However, sharing health data raises certain concerns regarding patients' privacy, namely related to the robustness of anonymisation procedures. Although these techniques remove personal identifiers from registries, some studies have shown that anonymisation procedures can sometimes be reverted using specific patients' characteristics. In this paper, we propose a secure architecture to explore distributed databases without compromising the patient's privacy. The proposed architecture is based on interoperable repositories supported by a common data model.