Lynx: A three-sided exchange
What will it take to accelerate the pace of medical innovation? This question has a simple answer: data. But the challenge is accessing and using data in a secure way, that is compliant with privacy regulations and mindful of patient privacy.
At Lynx.MD, we’ve taken on this challenge with a three-sided exchange that enables academia, private providers, and research teams to contribute, access, and work with de-identified patient data inside a highly-secure, cloud-based environment.
Side 1: De-identified medical data from thousands of patient records, physicians’ notes, drug treatments, and more.
Side 2: Researchers and data scientists that use real-world patient data to develop AI models to enhance clinical trials or provide insights on the patient journey.
Side 3: Health providers that contribute data to the network to support healthcare research and harvest insights to improve quality of care.
We not only prioritize the privacy and security of patient health data, but we’ve also developed tools and processes built with security in mind, so physicians and patients can be confident that health information remains private, while researchers and developers can safely and securely use that data to model and validate new treatment options, develop medicines to assist those treatments, and identify preventative approaches to improve healthcare for all. Read on to learn how the exchange works and what benefits it brings to participants.
Protecting real-world patient data
The privacy and security of confidential medical information are of paramount importance to patients and their healthcare providers. Yet, as technology advances, such as cloud computing and pervasive internet access, while healthcare providers can quickly obtain access to patient records and conveniently share information to support patient care, poor security protocols and irregular standards create an enormous risk of exposing confidential patient data to groups looking to profit from it. As a result, governments worldwide developed stringent standards that protect medical data, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Privacy regulations define sensitive or personal data as one that can be traced back to a person, directly or indirectly. Most privacy regulations offer frameworks and guidelines for making such data safer and not personal, like the de-identification guidelines of HIPAA Safe Harbor or anonymization and pseudonymisation in GDPR.
The Lynx Privacy Firewall offers military-grade security to ensure all data is HIPAA- and GDPR- compliant. The platform performs on-the-fly de-identification to enable users to work with real-world patient data while staying compliant. Lynx makes sure that the data, if need be, is anonymized before it is ever made available for third-party researchers. Data never leaves the data provider’s secure infrastructure and private cloud environment. Lynx provides strong end-to-end encryption and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to ensure that data transfers are secure.
More data, deeper research, faster insights
The advancement of medtech solutions is highly dependent on real-world data as better, faster decisions depend on medical teams having a holistic view of each patient. Lynx gives developers and data scientists the ability to quickly access millions of data points to test and run models that enable more rapid statistical analysis or predictive analytics. Further, rather than reach out to 20 different healthcare providers to request high-value clinical data, teams are able to access, curate and combine specific datasets of their choosing from one, secure location.
Because the data resides inside a secure environment and can’t be downloaded, Lynx provides a data science workbench fully equipped with common data science tools. Teams can write Python, R or SQL code inside the Lynx system. And as clinical data gets updated, all the graphs and visualizations update automatically in a dashboard.
Advancing healthcare and patient outcomes
Life sciences rely on real-world patient and clinical data for research and development, and yet acquiring this data has been burdensome across the board. That’s why a medical intelligence platform like Lynx that provides secure access to large, diverse real-world patient datasets can accelerate the growth of diagnostic and therapeutic solutions.
For example, real-world evidence can greatly improve clinical trial outcomes—from identifying inclusion criteria for clinical trials to increasing patient diversity in studies. Or for healthcare providers, amassed clinical data can drive organizational and clinical performance or ensure products and solutions are developed based on real-world data.
Through the Lynx trusted research environment, all parties can elect to securely share and learn from real-world clinical data insights to understand the impact of therapeutics, treatments and medical devices on patients.
To learn more about the Lynx platform and how it can help your organization, contact us.