OTTAWA, January 17, 2023 – Today, Replica Analytics Ltd, an Aetion® company, has announced a series of new training courses, titled Practical De-identification Methods for Health Data, intended to help healthcare and other organizations overcome the data access and sharing challenges they may face.
“We saw a need for more knowledge and skills development in modern de-identification methodologies, so we developed this highly practical course to help organizations understand and apply new solutions to their data access and sharing challenges,” said Dr. Khaled El Emam, course co-instructor and SVP and GM of Replica Analytics, who has more than 20 years of practical experience developing and applying privacy enhancing technologies. “We focus primarily on the health sector, where we have a great deal of experience and where data is arguably the most sensitive; however, our course is highly applicable for other sectors.”
To innovate, organizations need to leverage data, but they face many problems obtaining access to realistic datasets while preserving privacy. Modern methods to de-identify and anonymize datasets, so that they can be more easily used, are part of the solution. The new course helps organizations preserve privacy in a manner consistent with contemporary regulations such as the HIPAA Expert Determination method and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It covers structured data, including clinical trial datasets and real-world datasets as well as multiple data transformation techniques, such as risk-based methods and synthetic data generation. There is significant focus on developing participants’ expertise in privacy risk assessment and management methods as well as safeguards for processing data for secondary purposes. Hands-on exercises complement the instruction from world-leading experts in the field.
The training course was designed to appeal to a broad audience, including chief privacy and data officers, information officers and data analysts, among others. Participants in the inaugural course held in New York City in October 2022 recommend the course highly to others. The concepts are made clear “even for someone less familiar with this field,” according to one Senior Data Scientist from the pharmaceutical industry, who also noted that “the practical, real-world examples woven into each explanation make it plain that the instructors have years of experience.”
Upcoming training courses for Practical De-identification Methods for Health Data in 2023 include:
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Dubai (January 28-29)
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San Francisco (February 6-7)
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Toronto (March 7-8)
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Washington DC (April 6)
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Barcelona (April 24-25)