Big Data: Protecting Patient Privacy

Intermountain Healthcare, Deloitte Develop New Analysis Tool

Discovering important correlations between treatments and medical conditions requires a lot of digging and analysis.  Protecting patient privacy can be a challenge during this process, but Intermountain Health and Deloitte have developed a bid data analytical tool called OutcomesMiner, which Intermountain Health is using in conjunction with the electronic health record (EHR) repository to identify “clinical nuances.”  Asthma is a condition Intermountain plans to study to determine which mediations provide the best clinical outcome.

To protect patient privacy, Intermountain has patient data “curated, cleansed and de-identified” twice to ensure compliance with HIPAA privacy laws.  They’ve even hired professional statisticians to ensure data is completely de-identified. 

De-identification of data is something that Deloitte is accustomed to performing and plans to help other organizations who wish to utilize the OutcomesMiner analytical tool.

I believe this is a great tool that has the potential to change patient care on many different levels.  More importantly, if a correlation is discovered, organizations will be able to notify patients and offer the opportunity to participate in further studies if needed.  The fact that both Deloitte and Intermountain are so attuned to ensuring patient privacy and HIPAA regulations will also be a large selling point for many different types of healthcare organizations.  However, the biggest challenge they may face is understanding local and industry requirements for de-identifying and cleansing patient data.  If they are as good as they say they are, this shouldn’t be a challenge!

Article Referenced:

Kolbasuk McGee, Marianne.  (July 2, 2013).  Big Data: Protecting Patient Privacy.  HealthcareInfoSecurity.com.  Found on July 7, 2013.  Retrieved from http://www.healthcareinfosecurity.com/big-data-protecting-patient-privacy-a-5880