Gateway to the Cloud - Case Study: A Privacy-Aware Environment for Electronic Health Records Research

We describe a study in the domain of health informatics which includes some novel requirements for patient confidentiality in the context of medical health research. We present a prototype which takes health records from a commercial data provider, anonymises them in an innovative way and makes them available within a secure cloud-based Virtual Research Environment (VRE). Data anonymity is tailored as required for individual researchers´ needs and ethics committee approval. VREs are dynamically configured to model each researcher´s personal research environment while maintaining data integrity, provenance generation and patient confidentiality.