Press release: Achterhoek partnership monitors regional health with joint privacy-friendly data infrastructure

The Association for Digitalization of Healthcare Achterhoek and the 8RHK Gezond partnership have developed a privacy-friendly, cross-domain data infrastructure for monitoring health (interventions) together with TNO spinoff Linksight. The realization was made possible in part by Invest-NL. This allows healthcare and health in the region to be improved based on insights from the entire chain. In the Achterhoek, hospitals, general practitioners, elderly care, mental healthcare, public health services and municipalities work together under the name “8RHK Gezond” on regional health. A decentralized, privacy-friendly data infrastructure helps support, evaluate and monitor this.

Data-driven work in the region

To gain insight into the regional health situation, there is a need for a way to bring together and analyze data from different organizations. The regional working group GERDA (“Integrated Regional Data Infrastructure Achterhoek”) is developing this infrastructure after researching the possibilities. The involved parties perform joint data analyses without being able to view or trace each other’s sensitive patient data.

Maarten van Rixtel, chairman of the board of Sensire and chairman of the Association for Digitalization of Healthcare Achterhoek:

“GERDA is for us the way to responsibly bring together and analyze data from different organizations. It is a clear step towards truly data-driven work in the region. The first concrete results are available around acute care. We are now looking at the possibilities to further deploy GERDA for the development and monitoring of health in the Achterhoek”.

Privacy-by-design

The ultimately chosen technique, Multi Party Computation, makes it possible to set up data collaborations between multiple parties to analyze current data in a privacy-friendly way. What is special is that the data remains within the organization itself. In this way, parties gain insight across the healthcare chain at an aggregated level, but they learn nothing about individual patients or citizens. The software also ensures that parties remain in control of who can perform which analysis on which dataset (data governance) and that this can be demonstrated (auditing).

The infrastructure was developed in collaboration with TNO spinoff Linksight. Martine van de Gaar, CEO of Linksight:

“GERDA is a good example where parties sustainably collaborate across the silos of different domains, based on insights from data. How do you know what the effect of your actions is if you don’t have insights? We provide the technology to do that in such a way that the privacy of Achterhoek residents is guaranteed.”

Knowledge sharing

The working group published three publicly accessible whitepapers together with Population Health Data NL on the development of GERDA: on the various technical possibilities for cross-domain data sharing, on the wishes of users of a regional data workspace and the organization of the governance of such a regional data workspace.

Wednesday, May 31, 10:00 - 11:30 there is a webinar with a demo on how GERDA works and an explanation of the governance setup. More information about this webinar can be found at https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-gerda-is-live-demo-en-uitleg-data-governance-624217670857