Patient Data Anonymization

Breaking Barriers

Advancing Personalized Medicine through Improved Access to Patient Data for Pharmaceutical Companies

Patient Data's Role in Personalized Medicine: Overcoming Anonymization Challenges

Personalized medicine enhances treatment effectiveness while reducing side effects and costs by eliminating ineffective plans. It benefits patients through quicker access to effective treatments, saves insurance companies from costly medications, and allows pharmaceutical firms to streamline R&D processes, potentially accelerated by AI technologies. However, a key limitation is the access to vast amounts of patient data needed for clinical trials. Challenges such as difficult data access and unclear legal frameworks hinder this process, especially when integrating AI. Sourcing thousands of data records for trials can be resource-intensive and potentially lead to significant financial burdens. Leveraging modern technology could reduce these costs and expedite time to market.

Watch the video

with our colleague Dirk Asmus explaining how data and its anonymization can effectively drive precision medicine.

Efficient and Regulatory-Compliant Data Anonymization

How can data anonymization facilitate effective and efficient use of patient data while minimizing limitations that come along with anonymization?

The data anonymization process eliminates patient identifiers and lifts specific usage restrictions from the data. The latest anonymization technology also ensures that the anonymized data maintains the statistical integrity of the original dataset, thereby protecting privacy without sacrificing data utility.

By adopting anonymization, the pharmaceutical industry can collaborate with hospitals that possess an abundance of untapped data. The anonymized data can not only be used for internal research and drug development but can also be sold to third parties, introducing new revenue opportunities.

Graphic showing that conventional anonymization techniques tend to lose more information than necessary.
Graphic showing that the Graceful Anonymization Technique has a similar information value to the Original Dataset.
Source: Nation Patient Sample (NPS) dataset from HIRA (Health Insurance Review and Assessment service in Korea). The data in the graphic represents the number of male stroke patients for each age group. Hyukki Lee, Soohyung Kim, Jong Wook Kim and Yon Dohn Chung; Utility-preserving anonymization for health data publishing; Lee et al. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making (2017) 17:104

Graceful anonymization outperforms static anonymization

in terms of actual utility at the same level of privacy

Our ZEISS Digital Innovation Anonymization technology provides medical technology manufacturers with access to all existing datasets processed by their products, whether on-premises or in the cloud. By utilizing our anonymization solution, both – existing and future datasets can be utilized for research or reselling purposes.

The graceful anonymization algorithm ensures utility-preserving anonymization, providing high quality data while maintaining the accuracy of the original dataset and ensuring patient privacy.

The solution is designed to meet regulatory standards and is fully compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Thus, customers can be assured that they are complying with regulatory obligations when utilizing or exchanging data for the purposes of research or product design and development.

Access the potential of the data you process

Our team of experts is ready to help you unlock the power of healthcare data and integrate our anonymization technology in your application. The anonymization solution is independent of the current messaging or data standards you are utilizing and among others works with DICOM, FHIR and HL7 data.

Request a for free consultancy session with our data experts

Please enter your details below to request a complementary consultancy session with one of our health data management experts to discuss your approach to data management in the pharmaceutical industry. Our team will be in touch shortly to set up a meeting.

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If you want to have more information on data processing at ZEISS, please refer to our data protection notice.

Your contacts

Dirk Asmus
Dirk Asmus Senior Solution Specialist
ZEISS Digital Innovation Health & Life Science Solutions
Leo Lindhorst
Leo Lindhorst Head of Innovation
ZEISS Digital Innovation Health & Life Science Solutions

More about us and our mission

Our mission at ZEISS Digital Innovation Health Solutions is to create digital solutions today that will improve people's health tomorrow. We are a member of the ZEISS Group and a partner specialized in medical and life science technology and diagnostics for individual software development and quality assurance.

We speak health & digital: Together, we accelerate your digital health innovations. We look forward to meeting you and discussing how we can help you implement your digital roadmap!

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If you want to have more information on data processing at ZEISS, please refer to our data privacy notice.


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    Source: Nation Patient Sample (NPS) dataset from HIRA (Health Insurance Review and Assessment service
    in Korea). The data in the graphic represents the number of male stroke patients for each age group. Hyukki Lee, Soohyung Kim, Jong Wook Kim and Yon Dohn Chung; Utility-preserving anonymization for health data publishing; Lee et al. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making (2017) 17:104