You can find the Dutch translation of this article here.
The entire health sector can benefit significantly from assessing the actual impact of care and improving it where necessary. This collaboration between a non-profit organization, a commercial organization and Roseman Labs' privacy tech experts came together to gain more in-depth understanding of asthma and COPD prescribing practices.
Variation in medical treatments and prescription practices for medication is widespread. In order to provide patients with optimal care, it is crucial to identify and study the size and impact of practical variation. However, the relevant data is spread across different types of organizations, from hospitals to primary care and pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical (data) organizations may have the largest data sets to meet this challenge, but they also face the biggest obstacle: how to deal with commercial sensitivity when working together to improve care? A solution is to enable organizations to collaborate in a way that protects not only the privacy of individual data, but also the confidentiality of the dataset as a whole. Ultimately, this would lead to better insights and care for the patients.
Roseman Labs' platform allows pharmaceutical data organizations to link sensitive information while protecting patient privacy and the commercial sensitivity of the data. The more detailed the information, the more meaningful the results. In this case, researchers linked sources down to the level of individual treatments and the prescribed daily volumes. Normally, this information would be considered too sensitive to be included in a joint study - but with Roseman Labs, it was possible to connect the resources without disclosing the underlying data. Analysts were able to extract statistics and insights from this combined virtual source, a source of unprecedented value and details, ready to be used for health care progress.
Input data is encrypted at the source. The encrypted data is stored and processed in our engine which performs calculations on encrypted data and shares (aggregated) results of analyses via approved channels.
In this pilot, two different organizations - one commercial and one non-profit - were able to merge two different datasets. This information enabled data scientists to generate combined insights across the entire care pathways of relevant patient groups. The next step in the health care revolution is to enable more cooperation across a wider range of organizations. More in-depth insights will lead to more informed decisions, which will benefit both society and patients.