Why Is Patient Tokenization Important?
Healthcare data is exploding, with a single patient generating around 100 megabytes of data each year by 2025. The compound annual growth rate of data for healthcare is expected to be upwards of 40%, higher than most other major industries.
To keep all this healthcare data secure while facilitating the flow of information, there is a growing need to anonymously link a wide range of data sets together at the patient level. Healthcare data is extremely sensitive, but with patient tokenization, healthcare organizations can get a comprehensive view of the patient journey while maintaining a minimum risk of re-identification.
Tokenization works by removing the valuable data from your environment and replacing it with reversable tokens. Most businesses hold at least some sensitive data within their systems, whether it be personal information, Social Security numbers, clinical information, financial information, or anything else that requires security and protection.
Tokenization helps protect businesses from the negative financial and credibility impacts of a data theft. Even in the case of breach, valuable personal data simply isn't there to steal. Tokenization can't protect your business from a data breach—but it can reduce the financial fallout from any potential breach.
Patient Tokenization Benefits:
- Create links in acquired data sets from varied sources via one common patient ID across identified and de-identified data sets
- Get a consistent, anonymous patient identifier that enables longitudinal tracking of patients across settings of care
- Achieve interoperability across internal and external systems and parties
- Enable patient linkage and integration with patient-level data assets while protecting privacy and minimizing the risk of re-identification
WellStack offers healthcare organizations a proven, well-tested big data management and analytics solution built to help uncover opportunities for improving patient care, lowering costs and managing risk contracts.
WellStack’s data platform has a fully configurable mastering and tokenization engine to help healthcare organizations achieve:
- Patient matching—a deterministic and probabilistic matching process scores and compares tokens while controlling for missing data in order to assign a single patient ID based on the set of tokens produced
- Minimizing false positives and false negatives, such as controlling for seasonal residency, name standardization, name changes via marriage, etc.
- A consistent approach and methodology for customer solutions across patient-level data assets
Learn how WellStack™ can transform your organization
