Legal assessment tool (LAT): an interactive tool to address privacy and data protection issues for data sharing

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Research Article

Christian Ohmann¹  Wolfgang Kuchinke²  René Bergmann²  Töresin Karakoyun²  Christian Krauth²  Benjamin Braasch²  Martin Eckert²  Astrid Woollard³  Irene Schluender⁴ 

[1] ECRIN, KKS, Düsseldorf, Germany;Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany;Isis Innovation Ltd, Oxford, UK;TMF e.V, Berlin, Germany;

关键词: Data Protection;    Data Sharing;    Privacy Protection;    Usage Scenario;    Data Provider;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12911-016-0325-0

 received in 2015-12-20, accepted in 2016-06-17,  发布年份 2016

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundIn an unprecedented rate data in the life sciences is generated and stored in many different databases. An ever increasing part of this data is human health data and therefore falls under data protected by legal regulations. As part of the BioMedBridges project, which created infrastructures that connect more than 10 ESFRI research infrastructures (RI), the legal and ethical prerequisites of data sharing were examined employing a novel and pragmatic approach.MethodsWe employed concepts from computer science to create legal requirement clusters that enable legal interoperability between databases for the areas of data protection, data security, Intellectual Property (IP) and security of biosample data. We analysed and extracted access rules and constraints from all data providers (databases) involved in the building of data bridges covering many of Europe’s most important databases. These requirement clusters were applied to five usage scenarios representing the data flow in different data bridges: Image bridge, Phenotype data bridge, Personalised medicine data bridge, Structural data bridge, and Biosample data bridge. A matrix was built to relate the important concepts from data protection regulations (e.g. pseudonymisation, identifyability, access control, consent management) with the results of the requirement clusters. An interactive user interface for querying the matrix for requirements necessary for compliant data sharing was created.ResultsTo guide researchers without the need for legal expert knowledge through legal requirements, an interactive tool, the Legal Assessment Tool (LAT), was developed. LAT provides researchers interactively with a selection process to characterise the involved types of data and databases and provides suitable requirements and recommendations for concrete data access and sharing situations. The results provided by LAT are based on an analysis of the data access and sharing conditions for different kinds of data of major databases in Europe.ConclusionsData sharing for research purposes must be opened for human health data and LAT is one of the means to achieve this aim. In summary, LAT provides requirements in an interactive way for compliant data access and sharing with appropriate safeguards, restrictions and responsibilities by introducing a culture of responsibility and data governance when dealing with human data.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s). 2016