PHEMI Systems: Facilitating Data-Driven Research

Massive data sets available in electronic health records (EHR), medical devices, medical imaging, and insurance claims have opened up innovative research opportunities for pharmaceutical scientists. Using these data ensures more effective and equitable care for patients by bringing revolutionary personalized and precision medicine to reality. However, using protected health information (PHI) requires businesses to understand and adhere to stringent regulations—which is no easy task, as regulations are continuously amended. Data size, heterogeneity, or the use of unsophisticated data processing technologies are some of the issues while seeking valuable insights. Essentially, these factors hinder research and adversely impact the entire industry.

Enter PHEMI Systems—a company that simplifies the management of sensitive data for healthcare enterprises. Their trustworthy Health DataLab makes data-processing activities secure by controlling access to information based on the attributes of the accessor and ensuring data privacy and project governance. As such, data can be leveraged in multiple use cases without compromising privacy. More importantly, PHEMI manages compliance obligations like other data privacy solution providers while maintaining data-subject anonymity throughout data analysis, modeling and machine learning.

PHEMI uses a combination of data classification and meta-tagging to indicate data sensitivity and identify information that needs anonymization (and to what level). This plays a pivotal role in preventing unmanaged distribution of sensitive data, limiting the potential dangers of data leakage, while ensuring NSA level security for healthcare data. "The platform was developed by enterprise software architects who were visionaries in building big data platforms. They utilized their deep data expertise to design the Health DataLab a one-stop-shop for all healthcare research needs," says Rudy Potenzone, Chief Strategy Officer, PHEMI Systems.

PHEMI's Health DataLab is a cloud-based platform built with Privacy-by-Design principles on NSA developed technologies. It includes de-identification algorithms that hide restricted personal information, anonymize data and create dataset-specific or system-wide pseudonyms to mitigate the chances of leakage while sharing data.