Picking up from where we left off with advisory board member profiles late last year, we’ll continue our spotlight series with Dr. Troy Mounts, MD MA FAAOS and Anonomatic’s Chief Medical Advisor.
Dr. Mounts is an orthopedic spine surgeon whose passion for helping people started as a Missionary kid growing up in Papua New Guinea. “I believe in putting the patient first and treating all as if they are family.”
Dr. Mounts believes the best way to change the face of healthcare is through better educating patients about their medical issues and improving actions to resolve them. One way to do this is to bring Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems in line with what is possible, what is desired, and what is needed to protect patients such as big data analytics, which has a lot of positive and life-saving outcomes.
Changing the face of healthcare is one of the main reasons why Troy joined Anonomatic as an advisor. “Access to health records has been an ongoing struggle for all health providers no matter what specialty. The biggest hurdle has been securing information.”
Better healthcare outcomes leverage information from various sources including medical records and sensing technologies. It’s highly sensitive data containing both the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI). Current anonymization and privacy protection techniques, like differential privacy or tokenization, are not that secure, unable to link disparate data sources and their simple aggregations essentially lobotomize the data.
“PII Vault solves this problem,” says Troy. PII Vault takes any personal identifying pieces of information and swaps it out for a poly-anonymous identifier that is unique, inconsistent, unpredictable, has multiple potential values, and is not hashed. After data has been poly-anonymized, medical researchers can easily share data without the risk of losing PII. They can combine any number of poly-anonymized data sets, at the individual level, without ever receiving any PII. This makes robust and smart insights, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models more attainable.
Dr. Mounts continues, “PII Vault makes it possible to bridge the data gap thus improving patient care.”