You have a responsibility to protect patient privacy. Ardentia can help.

Why pseudonymise patient identifiable data?

The NHS makes extensive use of patient level data collected in the processes of delivering care. When use of the patient record data is not supporting the direct delivery of care or healthcare purposes, it is regarded as being ‘a secondary use’ of the data.  In accordance with Confidentiality: NHS Code of Practice, NHS organisations are required to pseudonymise patient information for use in research, teaching, auditing, management activities and other secondary uses.

The Pseudonymisation Implementation Project (PIP) required NHS organisations to have set plans by 2 October 2009 for implementing pseudonymisation functionality by March 2011.

How can Ardentia help?

Ardentia have developed a pseudonymisation tool that works not only with Ardentia’s proprietary data warehouse solution, but that can also be applied to other data warehouses based on SQL Server 2008 r2. By applying this tool you can rapidly ensure that you meet the requirements of PIP in time for the March 2011 deadline and avoid significant penalties, such as those covered by EHI in January 2010.

How does pseudonymisation work?

Pseudonymised information is similar to anonymised information in that in the possession of the holder it cannot reasonably be used by the holder to identify an individual. However it differs in that the original provider of the information may retain a means of identifying individuals. This will often be achieved by attaching codes or other unique references to information so that the data will only be identifiable to those who have access to the key or index.

Pseudonymisation allows information about the same individual to be linked in a way that true anonymisation does not. When consistently applied, pseudonymisation enables records to be linked over different data sets, different organisations and time, so that a population view of health care and associated activities can be developed from the pseudonymised records, without identifying individuals.

Contact Ardentia

For more information about how Ardentia can help you to pseudonymise secondary use data please email info@ardentia.co.uk or call us on 0844 848 1204.

Click here to download the Pseudonymisation flyer.