Revolutionizing Medical Data Sharing Using Advanced Privacy Enhancing Technologies: Technical, Legal and Ethical Synthesis
This addresses the problem of inefficient and privacy-concerned medical data sharing for healthcare and research institutions, though it is incremental as it builds on existing privacy-enhancing technologies.
The paper tackles the challenge of sharing medical data across institutions while preserving privacy and usability by synthesizing Homomorphic Encryption and Secure Multiparty Computation into Multiparty Homomorphic Encryption (MHE), which provides a mathematical privacy guarantee and performance advantages, potentially reducing reliance on inefficient contracts and accelerating medical research.
Multisite medical data sharing is critical in modern clinical practice and medical research. The challenge is to conduct data sharing that preserves individual privacy and data usability. The shortcomings of traditional privacy-enhancing technologies mean that institutions rely on bespoke data sharing contracts. These contracts increase the inefficiency of data sharing and may disincentivize important clinical treatment and medical research. This paper provides a synthesis between two novel advanced privacy enhancing technologies (PETs): Homomorphic Encryption and Secure Multiparty Computation (defined together as Multiparty Homomorphic Encryption or MHE). These PETs provide a mathematical guarantee of privacy, with MHE providing a performance advantage over separately using HE or SMC. We argue MHE fulfills legal requirements for medical data sharing under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which has set a global benchmark for data protection. Specifically, the data processed and shared using MHE can be considered anonymized data. We explain how MHE can reduce the reliance on customized contractual measures between institutions. The proposed approach can accelerate the pace of medical research whilst offering additional incentives for healthcare and research institutes to employ common data interoperability standards.