BOSTON and SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 8, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Datavant, the leader in helping healthcare organizations connect and share health data, today announced that it will be a founding member of the Boston University (BU) Data Privacy Collaborative, which aims to bring privacy-preserving technologies such as multi-party computing (MPC) to bear on real-world applications. Through the partnership, Datavant intends to design MPC-enabled approaches for sharing insights from health data drawn from multiple sources.
In healthcare, health data sharing offers enormous value for both patient care and research. However, the complexities of data protection and privacy concerns often limit sharing among organizations. MPC is an active area of research in cryptography that allows organizations to compare and perform analyses across multiple datasets, without receiving or seeing each other’s data.
As a member of the Collaborative, Datavant will continue its work with BU researchers to leverage their open source MPC libraries in the design of solutions that enable two or more parties to compute functions on their data without any of the data leaving its original environment. This approach represents a significant step toward a new industry standard for security and patient data protection.
“Our lab has been working on developing multi-party computing techniques for the last five years. The engineers and data scientists at Datavant have been excellent thought partners in bringing this technology out of the lab and into the realm of healthcare data privacy,” said Dr. Bestavros, Director of the Hariri Institute for Computing. “The Datavant team will further our goal of demonstrating and promoting the responsible use of private data assets in real-world applications for a better society.”
Datavant helps healthcare organizations to de-identify, share and connect data, using the current state of the art technology for data sharing at scale. “Protecting data and patient privacy is core to our values as a company, and in the last few years, there has been significant innovation in the technologies available to support these efforts. Our team follows all of these developments closely, and we were particularly impressed with the work of the faculty and researchers at BU,” said Travis May, CEO and Co-Founder of Datavant. “We believe that within five years, most analytics on third-party data will not require that the data leave that party’s environment, and we look forward to working with the BU team and with members of the Collaborative to make that belief a reality for the healthcare system.”
About the Boston University Data Privacy Collaborative
The Boston University Data Privacy Collaborative is an initiative of the Hariri Institute for Computing that brings together organizations interested in working with Institute researchers on promoting the responsible use of private data assets through the development of open-source platforms and through the deployment of pilots that demonstrate the potential for privacy-preserving technologies to address real-world applications for a better society. Membership in the collaborative is open to public and private institutions.
About Datavant
Datavant’s mission is to connect the world’s health data to improve patient outcomes. Datavant works to reduce the friction of data sharing across the healthcare industry by building technology that protects the privacy of patients while supporting the linkage of de-identified patient records across datasets. Datavant is headquartered in San Francisco. Learn more about Datavant at www.datavant.com.
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