PHI De-Identification and Sharing Software for Gulf-Based HIE Provider

About Our Client

The Client is a provider of the Health Information Exchange (HIE) platform from the Gulf region. The Client’s product enables secure real-time exchange of patient health information between the medical care providers.

Challenge

The Client worked on a software module that would anonymize patient data according to the parameters set by healthcare professionals and enable secure exchange of anonymized sensitive data (e.g., diagnoses, complications) between different health organizations’ departments. The anonymized data was intended to be used for further research, population health analytics, etc. Data security was a number one concern for the Client. The Client lacked back-end developers with experience in healthcare and needed to augment their software development team to deliver a healthcare data de-identification and sharing module to complement their HIE platform.

Solution

Owing to ScienceSoft’s decades-long healthcare IT experience and ISO 27001, ISO 9001, ISO 13485 certifications, the Client reached out to us for team augmentation. ScienceSoft provided the Client with a lead .NET developer with 10+ years of experience. Well-versed in medical software development and healthcare data exchange standards, the developer dived into the project specifics within a week.

The collaborative team designed and developed the front end and the back end of the data de-identification and sharing module. The software enables full or partial anonymization of patient health information retrieved from healthcare organization’s SQL databases and works the following way:

• Only authorized HIE users can access the data de-identification and sharing module. The user management rules were inherited from the HIE platform.
• Working with the system, an authorized user can create a patient data query: indicate a required data source, data transfer destination, data filters, data anonymization requirements (e.g., hide patient name/ID, encrypt the data), etc.
• The users with appropriate permissions can save requests for data anonymization and transfer them as reusable templates. Later, these templates can be assigned to other users to help medical professionals save time.

Thanks to the Client’s cooperation with ScienceSoft, the software meets all the requirements for PHI storage and handling and complies with the regional healthcare data protection regulations.

Results

As a result of cooperation with ScienceSoft, the Client delivered a secure data de-identification and sharing software and successfully launched it within 12 months. Satisfied with the work of ScienceSoft’s lead .NET developer, the Client decided to continue the cooperation with ScienceSoft on the evolution of the data de-identification module. In the future, the software will be able to process data from different data sources (besides SQL databases).

Technologies and Tools

.NET.