April 2023 Summaries

Since 2015, over $150 billion has been spent on healthcare mergers and acquisitions, driven by the need for data collaboration in a data-driven economy. This trend, exemplified by CVS's $8 billion acquisition of Signify Health, aims to address challenges in preventative and personalized care, real-world evidence from clinical trials, and genome-wide association studies by integrating disparate data sets. The integration of data allows for actionable insights that improve healthcare delivery and patient outcomes, although it is constrained by privacy regulations, data security requirements, and the fragmented nature of data held by different stakeholders like care providers, insurers, and pharmacies. The ultimate goal of these acquisitions is to facilitate better healthcare accessibility and delivery through trusted partnerships and holistic data analysis, despite the challenges posed by cybersecurity risks and regulatory compliance.

Organizations are increasingly recognizing the necessity for technical leadership, including CIOs and CISOs, to become more involved in driving business growth by leveraging data as a critical asset, while simultaneously managing the associated risks. This challenge is compounded by the rapidly evolving landscape of data regulations and the increasing reliance on third-party data arrangements, which often lack robust security measures. Duality's zero-access data analytics platform addresses these issues by enabling data insights without granting access to raw data, thereby enhancing privacy, security, and compliance. This approach fosters collaboration among C-suite roles like CISOs, CDAOs, and CPOs, who must align their objectives to support business growth while mitigating risks. The platform's effectiveness is exemplified by its partnership with Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, which has successfully balanced data utility and privacy in collaborative oncological studies. The ongoing dialogue about integrating security, privacy, and growth reflects the critical need for strategic cooperation among technical and business leaders.

Duality Technologies has partnered with Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (TLVMC) to facilitate secure data collaboration, allowing TLVMC's network to analyze sensitive patient data while maintaining privacy and regulatory compliance. Through Duality's platform, real-world data analysis is performed securely, enabling TLVMC and its partners to derive insights without compromising data protection. This collaboration aims to overcome the challenges of privacy and compliance in medical research by enabling more efficient and secure access to data, which is crucial for conducting multicenter studies and medical research efforts. The partnership underscores the importance of secure data handling in healthcare, as it allows for the combination of data from various centers, ensuring data privacy and ownership while providing accurate research results.

Healthcare data collaboration faces significant challenges due to stringent privacy and security requirements, which complicate efforts despite the potential benefits. While the Health Information Portability and Privacy Act (HIPAA) establishes standards for protecting personal health information, it also necessitates complex data-sharing agreements and deidentification processes to ensure compliance. These processes, including anonymization and pseudonymization, often require specialized technology and expertise, posing financial and logistical burdens. The difficulty in balancing data utility with privacy concerns is evident, as deidentification can reduce data accuracy and hinder insights. Additionally, different state laws and the involvement of various teams with divergent priorities further complicate the coordination needed for effective data sharing. The text highlights that while mergers and acquisitions in healthcare aim to centralize data ownership to streamline processes, they do not entirely resolve the technical and regulatory hurdles that persist.

In a presentation at the 2022 NORD Breakthrough Summit, FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf highlighted the significance of Real World Data (RWD) and Real World Evidence in enhancing clinical research, particularly for rare diseases and oncology. The primary challenge with RWD lies in the need to preserve patient privacy while enabling data sharing and analysis. To address this, Duality Technologies has developed a toolset utilizing fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) for secure data analysis, allowing computation on encrypted data without revealing raw data. In collaboration with Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center and Dana Farber Cancer Institute, this toolset was applied to oncological data, including a study on colorectal cancer patients, demonstrating its efficacy in performing statistical analyses with high accuracy and significantly reduced runtime compared to traditional methods. This advancement in privacy-preserving technology is seen as a pivotal development for collaborative research, allowing for comprehensive data analysis while ensuring data privacy, and a paper detailing these findings has been submitted to a prestigious journal for publication.

The collaboration in the healthcare sector, particularly in the context of genomic data and medical information, faces significant challenges due to data ownership issues and a lack of integrated systems. Despite the availability of advanced data analysis technologies like business intelligence, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, these tools are only as effective as the data they are trained on. Key players in the US healthcare system—such as patients, healthcare providers, pharmacies, pharmacy benefit managers, health insurance companies, research teams, and drug manufacturers—each hold critical pieces of patient data, but collaboration between them is often manual and fragmented. The introduction of IoT devices has improved data collection, yet the systematic sharing of data across these entities remains limited, hindering comprehensive healthcare initiatives. The article suggests that while technological solutions exist, the real challenge lies in overcoming regulatory and technical barriers to enable seamless data sharing and collaboration among stakeholders.