There is an understanding among healthcare industry professionals that improvement in how we approach healthcare requires better knowledge, and better knowledge requires better – and more – data. But how do we get larger amounts of quality data and still protect patient privacy?
IMS Brogan, the Canadian branch of IMS Health, came to Privacy Analytics in 2009 with two goals in mind: (1) Use Privacy Analytics’ Expert
Determination method of de-identification to help form a partnership with a large electronic medical record (EMR) vendor and (2) Securely deidentify
the EMR data obtained through the partnership so that it can be used to produce up-to-date analysis and understanding, while still protecting patient privacy.
Before working with Privacy Analytics, IMS Brogan had access to prescription and claims data, which had much less patient identifying
information in it, but as a result, lacked the rich analytic value of EMR data. When EMR data is responsibly de-identified, it can be used to create customized datasets that enable highly detailed performance analytics reporting and research.
