• ANID is based on fully de-identified, unlinked patient records, with no use of pseudo IDs.
• PCT patent filed for a new technology which uses a combination of techniques to match de-identified, unlinked records with corresponding hospital medical records.
• New system set-up increases data security and privacy protection.
• Technology can be applied in the identification of clinical trial candidate patients within trial sites.
   

ANID technology, as implemented in Clinerion’s Patient Network Explorer, significantly reduces any risk of private information being revealed when using patient medical records to evaluate study feasibility, or identifying patients for enrollment in clinical trials.

The new technology uses exclusively de-identified, unlinked records, but enables the duly authorized clinical trial manager at the hospital to re-identify eligible patients. Although all identifiable personal information and patient record identifiers have been completely stripped from medical records before use, the new technology can enable a healthcare provider to match these de-identified, unlinked records with corresponding hospital records through the use of a combination of techniques.

The new system set-up involves a one-way, outbound-only connection between the hospital IT infrastructure and the locally hosted Clinerion server, further increasing information security.

While offering a new, enhanced level of data protection, ANID maintains all the advantages of the legacy Clinerion technology, such as following HIPAA rules regarding protection against accidental identification. Query results for feasibility requests are stored in the Clinerion secure private cloud environment, which only sees aggregated counts of the patients which fit the queries. The performance of the Clinerion Patient Network Explorer is not affected, results still appear in real-time and it makes trial recruitment more efficient and effective in a fraction of the time needed by traditional search processes: minutes instead of months.

All new Clinerion installations will use the new technology from now on. Existing installations are being migrated at the request of partner hospitals.

ANID can be expanded for any uses wherein a database of de-identified, unlinked records must be queried and the records later re-identified.

The patent EP 2017/069859, “PATIENT RECRUITMENT SYSTEM,” was published in the European Patent Bulletin 2022/16 on April 20th, 2022. The patent was submitted on August 4th, 2017. The related US patent is expected to be published soon.