gms | German Medical Science

MedCo [1] the first privacy-preserving tool issued by the Data Protection for Personalized Health (DPPH https://dpph.ch) project that is co-developed by EPFL and the Lausanne University Hospital (https://medco.epfl.ch). MedCo is a data discovery system that enables a researcher or clinician to securely perform, through a user-friendly graphical interface, exploratory queries (SQL-like queries for simple statistics) on encrypted clinical and molecular data that are horizontally partitioned across different hospitals. By relying on state-of-the-art technologies for information security such as homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation and differential privacy, MedCo ensures (1) that patients' individual-level data are protected against illegitimate access by unauthorized people, (2) that no single authority has to be trusted for the security of the data and (3) that the re-identification risk is minimized. In this talk, we report on our ongoing effort for the operational deployment of MedCo within the context of the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) for the Swiss Molecular Tumor Board.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

The authors declare that an ethics committee vote is not required.