Patient data, made usable.

Challenge 01

The linkage problem

Research value depends on linking patient records across hospitals, primary care and registries — but every linkage point is also a re-identification risk regulators scrutinize.

• Multi-site studies fail without a shared patient key
• Tokens rarely survive consistently across source systems
• Every link is another surface for re-identification

Challenge 02

The compliance stack

GDPR, HIPAA where relevant, GxP in life sciences and institutional ethics review all apply to the same dataset, often with different definitions of "de-identified."

• No single standard for what counts as anonymous
• Ethics committees ask different questions than regulators
• Audit evidence has to satisfy both at once

Challenge 03

The ingestion gap

Clinical data enters through HL7 feeds and legacy exports long before anyone checks its shape, so bad records only surface once they have reached a study.

• Malformed HL7 messages pass silently into pipelines
• Errors surface downstream, after models are already trained
• Tracing a bad value back to its source takes days

Challenge 04

The OMOP conversion cost

Turning source clinical data into a comparable multi-site format like OMOP CDM is slow, manual work that most teams underestimate.

• Mapping local codes to OMOP vocabularies is specialist work
• Every new source system restarts the mapping effort
• EHDEN certification adds its own review cycle

Challenge 05

The audit expectation

Both the regulator and the ethics committee expect a record of who accessed what, when and why — not just that access was controlled.

• Access logs alone don’t show intent or approval
• Reconstructing an access history after the fact is expensive
• Different review bodies want the record in different formats

Challenge 06

The usability trade-off

The safest thing to do with patient data is lock it away, but that makes it useless for the research it exists to support.

• Over-redaction breaks the analysis it was meant to protect
• Re-requesting cleared data resets project timelines
• Every added control is a reason clinicians route around it