Swapping data: A pragmatic approach for enabling academic-industrial partnerships

OBJECTIVES: Academic institutions have access to comprehensive sets of real-world data. However, their potential for secondary use—for example, in medical outcomes research or health care quality management—is often limited due to data privacy concerns. External partners could help achieve this potential, yet documented frameworks for such cooperation are lacking. Therefore, this work presents a pragmatic approach for enabling academic-industrial data partnerships in a health care environment. METHODS: We employ a value-swapping strategy to facilitate data sharing. Using tumor documentation and molecular pathology data, we define a data-altering process as well as rules for an organizational pipeline that includes the technical anonymization process. RESULTS: The resulting dataset was fully anonymized while still retaining the critical properties of the original data to allow for external development and the training of analytical algorithms. CONCLUSION: Value swapping is a pragmatic, yet powerful method to balance data privacy and requirements for algorithm development; therefore, it is well suited to enable academic-industrial data partnerships.