During the onset of the pandemic, NIH needed to scale data-sharing to study COVID-19 epidemiology. They made use of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards and APIs to quickly and securely share healthcare information.
“Basically, that is a messaging system. From university to university, from hospital to hospital, you can use this API to share the standard and fast way,” said Belinda Seto, NIH deputy director for the Office of Data Science Strategy, at Imagine Nation ELC this week. “We have to do this fast because the epidemic was spreading so quickly. How can we then get an idea of the epidemiology? What are the groups that are most disproportionately affected, and in what regions of the world, and what parts of the country?”
However, patient-level data often contains Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and other protected information. So, the agency decoupled patient identities from patient data to protect sensitive information and adhere to privacy policies… Read the full article here.
