Systems and processes for assembling de-identified patient healthcare data
records in a longitudinal database are provided. The systems and
processes may be implemented over multiple data suppliers and common
database facilities while ensuring patient privacy. At the data supplier
locations, patient-identifying attributes in the data records are placed
in standard format and then doubly encrypted using a pair of encryption
keys before transmission to a common database facility. The pair of
encryption keys includes a key specific to the data supplier and a key
specific to the common database facility. At the common database
facility, the encryption specific to the data supplier is removed, so
that multi-sourced data records have only the common database encryption.
Without direct access to patient identifying-information, the encrypted
data records are assigned dummy labels or tags by which the data records
can be longitudinally linked in the database. The tags are assigned based
on statistical matching of the values of a select set of encrypted data
attributes with a reference database of tags and associated encrypted
data attribute values.