Healthcare Data Management
Life Sciences
The Challenge
Here was a challenge for all kinds of companies in the health care industry: companies commoditizing their health care data assets, health care informatics companies, medical researchers, labs, drug companies, health insurance companies, and hospitals.
These entities generate and/or receive different types of patient data from different sources – data including prescription claims, doctor claims, hospital observations, lab results, Electronic Medical Records, and many other sources.
To get holistic patient views and provide value-added applications, these companies need to be able to align patient information across the multiple data sources.
At the same time, they need to create and maintain anonymous patient databases that are HIPAA compliant and cleared of patient Protected Healthcare Information (PHI). This requires a third-party to de-identify the data and assign a customer-specific universal patient identifier to each patient. The patient identifier must be irreversible but repeatable across multiple data sets. And the same patient identifier must be created for the same patient over time for those data sets.
Health care entities everywhere have found the perfect prescription for these problems within the Life Sciences division at MSA.
What Did MSA Do
Life Sciences at MSA comes to the rescue with our De-Identification Engine, Data@Factory™ products and HITRUST certified HIPAA environment.
The MSA De-Identification Engine
Employing the latest patient data encryption technology and proprietary algorithms, our HIPAA certified De-ID Engine creates a compliant, irreversible result. Our De-ID Engine creates patient tokens comprised of patient PHI and ancillary patient information. Our de-identification process also includes the cleansing of patient data to create a standardized data set for tokenization to increase the longitudinal alignment of the patients. In addition, multiple patient tokens can be created to facilitate multiple patient matching options and increase longitudinal patient matching alignment.
The MSA Data@Factory™
This solution uses the patient tokens and ancillary patient data to create and maintain an anonymous Patient Master Universe of Patients. The patient tokens and ancillary patient data are matched to the Patient Master data. The patient data is assigned a matching patient ID, or a new patient ID is created for new patients.
The patient medical data processing begins with the de-identification of patient data by the MSA De-Identification Engine, and then continues through the MSA Data@Factory for the assignment of a new or existing patient ID. The patient ID can then be added to the medical data to be sent to you for analysis. Additionally, the MSA Data@Factory offers a complete set of data manipulation capabilities that allow for the alignment of other data, including the generation of additional conformed dimensions.
The Data@Factory outputs are fully customizable for each client.
We also offer the option of deploying our De-Identification Engine within your environment, a third party’s environment, or at MSA.
HIPAA Hi-Trust certified environment
For the receipt and processing of PHI data, we offer a HIPAA HITRUST certified environment. Managed by our ITSS team in partnership with our Life Sciences division, the HIPAA environment is critical to the success of the MSA Data@Factory processing. This environment allows you to choose to send your PHI data directly to MSA for de-identification processing. All it requires is a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) between MSA and the data supplier.
The Results
- Health care entities can align data from disparate data sets using anonymous patient IDs.
- The solution also supports matching across physicians, claims, payers, and other healthcare dimensions.
- A multi-layered encryption process protects data within the De-ID Engine.
- This approach prevents Data Dictionary attacks by ensuring no single entity has all encryption keys.
- Data suppliers, customers, and MSA Life Sciences each hold only part of the key structure, making re-identification impossible.
- The result is a fully HIPAA-compliant solution that delivers timely, secure insights from multiple data sources.
