An Infrastructure for Secure Sharing of Clinical Data

The ability to share database resources among collaborating organizations is highly desirable. This is especially true in the performance of clinical research and operations. However, challenges persist regarding interoperability in the exchange of resources among organizations that each need to preserve distinct local protection policies. Today’s approaches comprise varying techniques that fail in meeting these challenges. Secure Federated Data Sharing System (SFDS) was designed to generically solve these problems. While supportive of numerous use cases, focus is on applying SFDS in promoting collaboration in discovery of new therapeutics, improved patient care, and lowering medical costs through better access to clinical data. Applying leading edge access control technologies, SFDS allows policy preserving access to the data where it resides, rather than its exchange or central storage. Our objective is to make it easier to facilitate broad, but well controlled secondary access to medical data by the experts. An important virtue is that the data sharing infrastructure is non-intrusive and completely transparent to the otherwise normal business operations of participating organizations. Ease of deployment and efficiency make SFDS practical for meeting the data sharing and protection objectives of the clinical research and operations community.