Designing Privacy for Scalable Electronic Healthcare Linkage

A unified electronic health record (EHR) has potentially immeasurable benefits to society, and the current healthcare industry drive to create a single EHR reflects this. However, adoption is slow due to two major factors: the disparate nature of data storage facilities of current healthcare systems, and the security ramifications of accessing, using, and potential misuse of that data. To attempt to address these issues this paper presents the VANGUARD (Virtual ANonymisation Grid for Unified Access of Remote Data) system which supports adaptive security-oriented linkage of distributed clinical data-sets to support a variety of virtual EHRs avoiding the need for a single schematic standard and the natural concerns of data owners and other stakeholders on data access and usage. VANGUARD has been designed explicitly with security in mind and supports clear delineation of roles for data linkage and usage.