Clinerion has filed an international patent application following the PCT route for a new technology for patient search and identification based on the electronic medical records of patients held by hospitals. The anonymized identification (ANID) technology involves exclusively the use of anonymized data, ensuring the privacy and security of patient information. 

The new ANID technology, implemented in Clinerion’s Patient Recruitment System (PRS), significantly reduces any risk of private information being revealed when using patient medical records to evaluate study feasibility, or identifying patients for enrollment in clinical trials. 

The new technology uses exclusively anonymized records, but enables the duly authorized clinical trial manager at the hospital to re-identify eligible patients. Although all identifiable personal information and patient record identifiers have been completely stripped from medical records before use, the new technology can enable a healthcare provider to match anonymized records with corresponding hospital records through the use of a combination of techniques, incl. checksum algorithms.

The new system set-up involves a one-way, outbound-only connection between the hospital IT infrastructure and the locally hosted Clinerion PRS server, further increasing information security. 

While offering a new, enhanced level of data protection, ANID maintains all the advantages of the legacy Clinerion PRS technology, such as following HIPAA rules regarding protection against accidental identification. Query results for feasibility requests are stored in the PRS secure private cloud environment, which only sees aggregated counts of the patients which fit the queries. The performance of PRS is not affected, results still appear in real-time and the number of eligible patients found remains 10-30 higher than through conventional methods.

“This truly disruptive approach has a number of advantages over conventional methods, making data research and patient identification considerably more secure,” said Andreas Walter, Chief Technology Officer of Clinerion. “Anonymization is the gold standard when it comes to patient privacy protection during the use of patient medical data. ANID removes all possible sources of concerns.” 

“The privacy of the individual patient is paramount and patient data security is increasingly legislated,” said Ulf Claesson, Chief Executive Officer of Clinerion. “We are pleased to offer a solution which changes the game. At the same time, this revolutionary technology future-proofs Clinerion’s services for clinical trial patient recruitment and market access activities.” 

All new PRS installations will use the new technology from now on. Existing installations will be migrated at the request of partner hospitals. 

ANID can be expanded for any uses wherein a database of anonymized records must be queried and the records later re-identified.