Pamela Lewis Dolan reports:
The Cleveland Clinic is backing a startup company that has built a search engine for electronic databases that would allow research using de-identified patient data.
A newly formed company called Explorys is commercializing the patient database search system Cleveland Clinic developed. According to Stephen McHale, chief executive officer and co-founder of Explorys, health care organizations that sign on as partners will pay an annual subscription fee and have the option of sharing their data with the rest of the network, and making use of data others choose to share.
[…]
“There’s just so little detail about this that I think it’s hard for those of us who care about the privacy issue to be universally excited based on someone’s reassurances that everything’s OK,” said Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
She said she wasn’t aware of any details about the company or the project outside of news releases and media reports. “I think the public is owed some detail.”
Read more on American Medical News.