A group of Chinese researchers recently published a paper about possible improvements in clinics' cloud data management that will allow healthcare facilities to share medical information with scientific institutions while maintaining patients' privacy.
The authors discussed sanitizers—software that encodes data blocks with personal patient information and stores sanitized data on the EMR's cloud. They can also audit the data and detect/delete duplicate files in the storage.
Paper authors assumed such dataflow improvements would noticeably facilitate the transfer of healthcare information for scientists. However, besides the impact on research facilities, described data sanitizers may be particularly useful for business.
Cloud storage complications
The paper defines two main complications you may face using EMR:
- Data duplication. EMR systems sometimes create unnecessary file copies while implementing the new database or editing presented information.
- Security concerns. They appear due to a lack of physical control over the data storage. Some cloud providers may implement specific modifications to old data or even delete rarely used samples to optimize storage.
Additionally, there is always room for speculation about privacy issues – once you work with personal healthcare information, you should be exceptionally scrupulous in keeping this data secret.
Possible Solution
Data sanitizers may become a valuable addition for modern ERMs to fix the mentioned issues.
First, this software encodes data blocks with patients' personal information and then uploads only the "sanitized" clinical data to cloud storage. Thus, even if these data get leaked somehow, no one can use private information such as names, addresses, insurance numbers, etc.
Then, the uploading process includes the audit, during which sanitizer checks if storage contains a duplicate file copy. Thus, you can avoid improper use of your cloud storage.
Remember that your encoded data, which lacks personal information, can be a foundation for breakthrough research! (if your facilities' policies allow you to share them)
