Queen Victoria hospital implements Mastek’s Kameleon™ to ensure that its patient data can be reused and shared without risk of exposure

Mastek, the global provider of vertically-focused enterprise technology and platforms, today announced that Queen Victoria Hospital (QVH) NHS Foundation Trust, a leading specialist centre for reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation is the first NHS Trust to implement their data privacy solution, Kameleon™.

Mastek’s Kameleon solution is a powerful pseudonymisation tool designed to help organisations reuse and share data safely, both internally and with third parties. QVH has signed an agreement with Mastek to implement Kameleon on 35 IT systems that store confidential patient identifiable data (PID). Kameleon will process the source data and store the pseudonymised information within a shared repository.

Kameleon is sector agnostic and its unique data pseudonymisation capability is fully reversible and performs anonymisation and/or encryption on multiple fields within a dataset enabling the flexible storage and exchange of sensitive information across multiple parties.

All commissioners and providers of NHS care are now required to implement a pseudonymisation capability. The Pseudonymisation Implementation Project (PIP) [1] is concerned with enabling the NHS to undertake secondary use of patient data in a legal, safe and secure manner.

The 2010/11 NHS Operating Framework [2] sets clear targets for all NHS bodies with regard to maintaining data privacy. Its Guidelines on Informatics Planning state that: "It is NHS policy and a legal requirement that patient level data should not contain identifiers when they are used for purposes other than the direct care of patients, including local flows between organisations as well as data extracted from the Secondary Uses Service."

Dominic Bailey, Head of Information Governance, Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust commented:
“We chose Mastek’s Kameleon solution for our Pseudonymisation Implementation Project (PIP) as Kameleon made it easy to pseudonymise each of our 35 heavily interlinked IT systems. As a result, certain identifiers are now automatically replaced from our patient-level data when it is used for any secondary use purpose, including local flows between organisations as well as data extracted from the secondary uses service. Kameleon has therefore enabled QVH to be completely compliant with the latest governmental legislation in this area, and to keep our patient‘s private data safe and secure.”

Furthermore, the Data Protection Act of 1998 mandates that any type of organisation, whether public or private, is legally required to protect data and any serious breaches are subject to fines from the ICO of up to £500,000.

Barry Yard, Managing Director, Mastek UK explains: "Mastek developed Kameleon for organisations within the NHS, and other organisations involved in the commissioning and provision of NHS-commissioned care, to provide a robust data privacy solution to manage the use of patient data for secondary purposes legally, safely and securely. We’ve always known that the ability to facilitate the multi-party management of private data is essential for organisations like the health service, but it is now equally important for any modern organisation that needs to keep its personal data secure, especially in the wake of recent government legislation and the growing number of large fines being issued by the ICO.”

Yard continues:
"We developed Kameleon as a direct result of our experience designing, building and managing a number of different solutions for central and local government, and healthcare. Each NHS trust urgently needs to follow in the footsteps of QVH, as they are required by strict guidelines set out by the Department of Health to comply with key requirements for pseudonymisation as set out in the 2010/11 NHS informatics planning guidance.”

[1] http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/systemsandservices/sus/delivery/pseudo
[2] http://www.dh.gov.uk/prod_consum_dh/groups/dh_digitalassets/documents/digitalasset/dh_110336.pdf

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