Gateway to the Cloud - Case Study: A Privacy-Aware Environment for Electronic Health Records Research

We describe a study in the domain of health informatics which includes some novel requirements for patient confidentiality in the context of medical health research. We present a prototype which takes health records from a commercial data provider, anonymises them in an innovative way and makes them available within a secure cloud-based Virtual Research Environment (VRE). Data anonymity is tailored as required for individual researchers' needs and ethics committee approval. VREs are dynamically configured to model each researcher's personal research environment while maintaining data integrity, provenance generation and patient confidentiality.