IDBS Supports Proposals for Secure use of Patient Data

Benefits UK healthcare, safeguards in place to protect patient confidentiality

Guildford, UK, December 08, 2011 - IDBS, a UK headquartered global provider of innovative data management, analytics and modelling solutions, announces that it supports the UK Government’s proposal for the controlled and anonymised use of patient data. IDBS also believes that the benefits of this initiative must be better communicated to the wider public in order to address the understandable concerns surrounding the protection of personal data.

Specific potential benefits for healthcare in the UK of making anonymised patient data available to advanced medical research projects include:

• ensuring that NHS physicians can draw on knowledge based on patient outcomes from the whole population rather than a small part which may not be representative
• based on a deeper, stratified understanding of disease, enabling the NHS to allocate resources more effectively
• enabling patients to know that therapies being prescribed are best for their individual needs, and
• focusing research on diseases where there are currently few, if any, effective treatments

Over the past 20 years IDBS has developed groundbreaking information systems - involving the handling of sensitive real-world patient data - to healthcare and life science R&D organisations around the world. These organisations include hospitals, health trusts, universities, pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

Currently, IDBS is providing its unique medical research platform to the UK’s leading research organisations, including Kings Health Partners and other Academic Health Science Centres, to investigate personalised therapies for cancer, cardiovascular and other diseases, a field where they lead the world. IDBS is also pioneering a national cancer research platform supported by the Government’s Technology Strategy Board. This will enable clinicians to identify therapies according to the specific genetic characteristics of individual patients, thereby increasing the number of successful treatment outcomes.

This valuable research would be impossible without consented access to patient data.

Existing technologies for anonymisation (pseudonymisation) fully protect patient confidentiality.

The translational medical research projects supported by IDBS require specific patient opt-in for sharing medical data which is totally anonymised from the start of the process. The technology and procedures supported by IDBS ensures that only doctors responsible for patients can know their identity.

Neil Kipling, founder and CEO of IDBS said “From our position as a global leader in advanced medical research informatics, it is clear that the UK is leading the field. The anonymisation and ‘opt-in’ systems we deploy have been successfully used, for a number of years, to enable the secure sharing of data between carefully selected, authorised parties. 

The success of advanced medical research will depend on large amounts of patient data being made available so that meaningful conclusions are possible. With better communication of the significant benefits to patient outcomes that will result from this research, we believe that there will be wide support for the Government’s proposal.”  

About IDBS

IDBS is a global provider of innovative enterprise data management, analytics and modeling solutions. The company’s uniquely sophisticated platform technologies are used by more than 200 pharmaceutical companies, major healthcare providers, global leaders in academic study, and high tech companies to increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve the productivity of industrial R&D and clinical research. IDBS is clearly differentiated by its unique combination of award-winning enterprise technologies and domain knowledge in R&D.

IDBS’ solutions help scientists, hospitals and R&D businesses produce the world’s newest therapeutics, diagnostics and personalized treatments, high-tech materials and consumer products, faster, cleaner engines and fuels, breakthroughs in productive agriculture, healthy, safer food products, and high tech materials and products.

Founded in 1989 and privately held, IDBS is headquartered in Guildford, UK with a direct sales and support presence worldwide. IDBS is a 2010 Profit Track 100 company and the recipient of multiple awards including the Frost and Sullivan 'Enabling Technology' Award in R&D data management for 2010 and Queen's Award for International Trade 2011. For regular updates follow us on Twitter @IDBSsoftware

For media enquiries, please contact:

Danielle Guinebertiere, IDBS Communications Director
Tel: +1 908 429 2933
Email: dguinebertiere@idbs.com