Support for research on distributed data sets is challenged by stakeholder requirements limiting sharing. Researchers need early stage access to determine whether data sets are likely to contain the data they need. The Broker Leads project is developing privacy-enhancing technologies adapted to this discovery phase of data-driven research. Its approach is inspired by health information exchanges that are based on a broker system where data are held by healthcare providers and collected in distributed queries managed by the broker. Such systems have potential to support public health and biomedical research. The project targets "similar patient queries" where the query is a patient medical record and the response is information about similar patients. Such queries have value for many applications, including developing cohorts for finding institutions for further discussions about joint research. Broker Leads uses the concept of a "lead" in which data holders provide representative collections of non-identifiable real or synthetic data meeting strong privacy guarantees, e.g., differential privacy. Even though such data may be unsuitable for clinical decision making and scientific discovery due to the transformations done for privacy protection, they guide a user of a broker lead system to the data sets very likely to be useful to addressing a given similar patient query. These data sets can then be used with other privacy-protecting strategies, such as secure multiparty computation or restrictive data use agreements ensuring adequate data protection. In addition to providing practical and well-analyzed strategies for early stages of research on healthcare data, this project will provide new insights into practical issues with privacy technology in end-to-end applications.
TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Broker Leads for Privacy-Preserving Discovery in Health Information Exchange