Conveners
MedCo - Fostering Multi-Centric Medical Collaborations with Decentralized Privacy-Enhancing Technologies
- Jean Louis Raisaro (CHUV)
Description
Using real-world evidence in biomedical research, an indispensable complement to clinical trials, requires access to large quantities of patient data that are typically held separately by multiple healthcare institutions. Centralizing those data for a study is often infeasible due to privacy and security concerns. Federated analytics is rapidly emerging as a solution for enabling joint analyses of distributed medical data across a group of institutions, without sharing patient-level data. We propose MedCo, a novel federated query system for distributed and privacy-preserving cohort exploration. MedCo enhances federated analytics with advanced privacy-enhancing technologies such as multiparty homomorphic encryption. It enables users to perform distributed cohort exploration and compute federated analytics on identified cohorts scattered across several institutions without the need of transferring patient data out the IT infrastructure of the data provider.
