Software to enable secure data-sharing for hospitals

(Image: Pixabay CC0) - The MedCo system aims to facilitate medical research on pathologies - such as cancer and infectious diseases - by enabling secure computations on decentralized data. The unique software has recently been deployed at three Swiss hospitals. MedCo was first released in 2019 as the first operational system to protect sensitive patient data so that it can be used collectively for medical research. The culmination of nearly a decade of internal research, the system was developed in the Laboratory for Data Security ( LDS ) in EPFL's School of Computer and Communication Sciences ( IC ), in collaboration with the Lausanne University Hospital ( CHUV ). After a year of intense cooperation with hospital IT and legal experts, MedCo has now been deployed across the university hospitals of Lausanne, Geneva, and Bern. "The opportunity to query decentralized databases securely, while eliminating the possibility of identifying patients, is an important lever for accelerating university clinical research in Switzerland," says CHUV deputy managing director Oliver Peters. "As our ability to analyze and understand the diseases of individual patients grows, learning from experience becomes a necessary driver for improvement in patient care.