Optimizing clinical pathways with federated data

Clinical pathways are currently difficult to optimize due to sensitive data that is typically distributed across organizations while rules and regulations constrain access and data processing. In this paper we describe a federated approach that can significantly reduce the efforts required to overcome these obstacles. First, we describe a standard conceptual workflow for optimizing clinical pathways, including all steps and involved stakeholders. This is followed by a translation of the workflow into a real-world scenario with an associated proof of principle to demonstrate how the scenario can be implemented on top of a federated framework. We present the most important results and conclude with an overview of the benefits for each of the stakeholders. Our most important outcomes are: the federated approach offers significant benefits for all relevant stakeholders and has little downsides. A policy-driven framework with embedded policy enforcement is crucial for successful adoption of a federated approach. Integration of safe statistics and synthetic data generation in a federated framework is straightforward and offers additional benefits, especially when setting up healthcare consortia. This solution is almost ready to be adopted by healthcare organizations as part of their regular operations.

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