Accessing health care data has always posed a challenge for researchers in the healthcare industry due in large part to privacy concerns, as the breach of such personalized data could result in significant contingent liabilities while also potentially ruining the reputation and careers of those medical practitioners involved.
However, the ability to harness high value healthcare data that comes from, “areas including health research to find cures for diseases, for public health research that deals with outbreak detection, such as outbreaks of food borne illnesses and other preventative interventions such as cancer screening,” was too great to pass up.
Therefore to sort this issue, Dr. Khaled El Emam founded a startup called Privacy Analytics. The purpose behind this venture was to guard the privacy of personal information that will be used to do research and analysis within the healthcare industry.
Explaining the function, founder and CEO of Privacy Analytics, Dr. Khaled El Emam said that, “We are in a unique position to give our clients the ability to cost-effectively execute big data analytics on their databases, share that data with the confidence that personal privacy is respected, and still provide the highest quality data needed by complex business intelligence tools. In effect, we have democratized valuable customer or patient data for many other uses.”
To unbolt the huge healthcare data without the requirement of a patient’s permission, Privacy Analytics had raised an undisclosed amount through VCs like Capital Angel Network and BDC IT Venture Fund recently so it could provide better quality services to their clients moving forward while competing within an increasingly competitive database security market.
At the moment, this Ottawa based startup is working with pharmaceutical companies, research organizations, insurance providers and healthcare practitioners across North America. The software created by Privacy Analytics has helped remove identifying information for over 100 million records up till now.
Due to their high quality services, one of the major health services research institutes of Canada, the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences has endorsed the Privacy Analytics product called PARAT (The Privacy Analytics Risk Assessment Tool) in order to provide Ontario’s rich data resources for cancer and de-identified information to researchers.
El Emam in discussing the agreement stated, “They have been using this product for a couple of years now. By using PARAT they have streamlined the costly and complicated process of data access for cancer researchers in Ontario.”
Source: Tech Vibes
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