Ellison Anne Williams, CEO and founder of Enveil, shares in this exclusive article with Top Business Tech why Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are crucial to the healthcare space.
Excerpt:
The balance between the public interest and healthcare-related data privacy has been the subject of an ongoing debate that has only heightened as the world combats a global pandemic. As the UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said at the 2020 Founders Forum HealthTech Summit, “We are absolutely rigorous about the needs of privacy, but we mustn’t let that get in the way of innovation that can improve people’s lives. We must do both — allow for innovation of the data and allow for the highest quality of privacy and cybersecurity.”
In order to respond effectively to a global pandemic, governments and jurisdictions need access to extensive healthcare data sourced from locations and populations around the world. While the data is abundant, securing broader access to this data landscape is not without its challenges. The inherent sensitivities associated with healthcare data dictate that enabling access cannot come at the expense of privacy and security. As a result, regulatory and technical barriers often restrict healthcare data collaboration efforts.
Finding balance in using this sensitive data has typically hinged on the premise that data privacy and data collaboration are mutually exclusive functions. Yet, there is an increasingly visible family of technologies delivering on the proverbial have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too by preserving data privacy throughout the processing lifecycle while securely facilitating collaboration. Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) overcome many of the access, regulatory, and technical barriers that currently restrict global sharing of healthcare-related data by enabling critical parties to securely search data, no matter where it is stored, without disclosing the search’s content or jeopardising the security of the underlying data.
Read the full article at Top Business Tech.
