The EU healthcare system is at risk of losing its globally admired affordability and accessibility, due to an aging population and increasing medical possibilities and their related cost. To ensure it, “value-based health care” is needed. This requires constant measurement and improvement of the real-world effectiveness of healthcares. However data is locked up within data silos at all parties and is difficult to bring together because of privacy, security and business confidentiality. As a result, it is problematic to design, implement and evaluate effective healthcare innovations that transcend the value chain. The current practice for evaluating the effectiveness of e.g. an eHealth app is to have a trusted third party (TTP) aggregate and pseudonymize the sensitive patient information from the various organizations, before sending it to a university to perform a set of statistical measures on it and draw conclusions. This process costs well over EUR 100k per study and takes over a year to complete. It is mainly manual labor.
Secure multiparty computation (MPC) technology offers a new data-sharing paradigm to answer these two questions. MPC is cryptographic technology (part of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies, in short PET) that allows decentralized analyses to be performed on encrypted (and therefore unreadable) datasets from different parties. Parties can do joint computations without revealing individual data points to each other, only the outcome can be decrypted. The sensitive data remains at the source, which greatly reduces the chance and impact of a data breach. This is possible through the use of specific, advanced forms of cryptography, such as (Full) Homomorphic Encryption ((F)HE), Secret Sharing (SS) and Private Set Intersection (PSI) protocols. The Linksight deep-tech innovation is a software platform that allows organizations to easily perform and automated secure and compliant privacy-preserving data analysis without revealing the underlying sensitive data to anyone, and without relenting control over it.
The goal of our project is to explain what PETs in general are and what value and positive impact they have for us as a society and businesses, and to developed the neccesary steps for customers to start working with these innovative products based on deep tech.
