Paul Grundy, MD, MPH,
IBM Well-Being Director, Global Well Being Services and Health Benefits

John Bliss, JD, Privacy Strategist, IBM
IBM Software Group, Entity Analytic Solutions
You hear it everywhere: innovation today depends on collaboration, often across disciplines and geography.
But who would have thought that a new solution to securely--and anonymously--share healthcare data would have come from our partnership: a physician working in IBM Human Resources and a privacy strategist from a newly acquired software firm.
What’s more it all started right here on the HealthNex blog.
In 2005, IBM acquired Systems Research and Development (SRD), a software company that specialized in detecting “who is who” across disparate operational systems.
Dr. Paul Grundy, Well-being Director in IBM’s corporate HR department, discussed some of the possibilities and implications of the company’s technology in healthcare in an early test post (during HealthNex’s development phase, which alas, was later deleted.)
Fortunately,John Bliss, an attorney and privacy strategist who came to IBM with the SRD acquisition, saw the post and got in touch with Paul. The pair’s different perspectives helped figure out a way that the SRD technology could improve health care through better analysis, while simultaneously protecting the privacy and anonymity of patients.
What the technology could enable is new kinds of data-intensive medical research, as well as easier ways to make health care costs and outcomes more transparent to patients and the public. Such price transparency is considered essential to supporting the range of changes and paradigm shift that IBM is calling “patient-centric healthcare.”
The problem is that there are two types of data that need to come together to make a quantum leap forward in health care – translation: innovation that matters:
- The first kind—called transactional data—is all the personal health history we typically think of as patient information or electronic health records, as well as financial info such as the cost of a procedure or treatment.
- The second is analytical data, using large pools of transactional data, potentially from thousands of patients, for medical research or other kinds of analyses (such as measuring which patients had the best outcomes for the lowest cost.)
As you can imagine, privacy protections have made it difficult to enable large volumes of patient data to be made available for research databases. What our combined insights hit upon was just such a way to bring these
two silos together: to strip out the identity of patients’ data, yet
still allow the pooled information to be processed in ways that would
reveal valuable patterns.
The following may sound kind of gorpy, but the process uses encryption algorithms known as one-way hashes and some proprietary preprocessing technology, but it means that patient and financial data can be anonymized and then correlated and analyzed while still in its masked form (a technique not previously known and now the subject of several new IBM pending patents).
SRD had been using similar clear-text approaches for confirming “who is who” in certain homeland security applications. In addition, this anonymization technology is already in operation with our government and a foreign government. Once Paul understood how it worked, he started talking to John and Jeff Jonas, SRD Founder and now Entity Analytic's Chief Scientist, about how it could help crack a major data problem in healthcare informatics.
And today, their collaboration has resulted in Entity Analytic's Anonymous Resolution product.
Tailored for health care, AR offers promise to give researchers realtime results. As soon as patient data flows into the analytical pool, results and insights are appropriately published. What’s more, each new piece of data—say the next results from a liver test—will improve the next analysis. This solution is roughly analogous to how the continual flow of financial data into credit bureaus changes each of our credit ratings with every transaction we make.
Of course, the purpose of this post is not to be some disguised press release or promotion for IBM software. What we think is really instructive here is that innovation happens when different kinds of expertise and experience come together.
Making those kinds of opportunistic connections happen is important for any company or organization that wants to increase its ability to innovate. Our small advance is really just an example of the evolving nature that innovation is taking. Of course, we’d like to hear some of your examples of how innovation is happening in healthcare in new ways. And how we might apply this new healthcare data anonymizing technology to serve other healthcare innovations.
Lastly, this innovation insider story also circles back to the mission for this HealthNex blog: to be an intersection for the kinds of connections that feed innovation, such as the recent Blogposium that brought so many healthcare bloggers and experts together.
FYI: Attached is a very thoughtful piece by a noted privacy and health care policy expert, Peter Swire, that describes Anonymous Resolution and its promise in the health care industry in a bit more detail.
Also, our colleague Jeff Jonas blogs about this and other privacy enhancing technologies at www.jeffjonas.typepad.com.
IBMHealthNexHealthcare Privacy
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