Workshop "The death of data sharing? A modern privacy technology survival kit"
Collaborate! Collaborate! Collaborate!
This is the mantra that we all have been hearing, with good reason, to deliver value and innovation for the greatest benefit of the patients. But what if one needs to share clinical data, where privacy concerns are of the utmost importance? What if clinical data is siloed by national laws and constraints or even by geopolitical tensions? Sharing data certainly represents a huge challenge, which can only be faced by deploying appropriate privacy-preserving tools.
All that was at the heart of the VII workshop of the Personalized Health Series, "The death of data sharing? A modern privacy technology survival kit", held on the 15th of May, and jointly organized by Personalized Health Basel and Roche.
The initial session saw the interventions of two legal experts: Tobias Schulte in den Bäumen from Roche and Alfred Früh from University of Basel, who drew a pretty bleak and gloomy picture of the current legal landscape: the lack of a consensus on many critical issues results in continuous and costly stop-and-go and dead ends. Peter Krusche from Novartis improved the mood of the audience, by discussing some of the tools to overcome barriers. Sharing and collaborating is still possible!
The first keynote from Philippe Gottfrois from University Hospital Basel (USB) showed how federated learning enables diagnosis in dermatology while preserving the privacy of patients in Africa, where the privacy culture can deeply differ. The second keynote from Bram Stieltjes from USB, Astrid Kiermaier from Roche and Armin Scheuer from MDClone, showed another tool: synthetic data. USB and Roche built in about 6 months, with the help of MDClone, a platform to easily access anonymized clinical data from the USB data warehouse.
The pitching session was once more one of the highlights of the event: selected attendees showcased the projects they are working on, while exploring opportunities for possible collaborations, and revealing the creativity of many innovators, as well as the interesting perspective of startups and smaller companies on the topic.
The event closed with the panel discussion, moderated by Dominik Heinzmann, with Astrid Kiermaier, Peter Krusche, Bram Stieltjes and Alfred Früh. The take-home message: focus on the opportunities within the current legal framework, deploy privacy-preserving tools and keep sharing data.
Do not miss the next workshop of the Personalized Health Series, “Democratizing the Health Data Ecosystem: From Challenges to Solutions”, later this year. We will continue our journey in the realm of data sharing and keep exploring opportunities to make it available and easily accessible.
