Protecting patient data in the age of digital pathology

Advances in digital pathology can be thrilling, promising significant benefits to medical research and collaboration, yet the challenge of safeguarding patient privacy is always a priority. Maintaining patient confidentiality is crucial to compliance with regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines in the European Union.

As digital pathology opens greater opportunities for professional collaboration, research, and education, the pivotal question is: How can organizations effectively meet the data security requirements while still realizing the value of digital transformation? Patients may need to consent to the sharing of their records between healthcare professionals to provide insights. Like organ donors, they can volunteer their data to further research and science. At the same time, their personally identifiable information (PII) can remain protected and removed from the data.

Balancing the risks and rewards of digital pathology

The growing popularity of digital pathology means pathologists and physicians can quickly access digital images of biological specimens. Digitized slides can also ease collaboration among pathologists across their physical locations.

Many are embracing this development, noting its potential to speed research in understanding diseases impacting individuals or global populations. The practice of digital pathology can facilitate research by integrating with artificial intelligence (AI)-based machine learning for pattern recognition that eludes human visual perception.

Of course, new possibilities come with new challenges. Labs and other healthcare organizations are evaluating best practices for digital pathology. Due to the sensitive nature of digital pathology images and their respective metadata, stringent safeguards must be in place to prevent unauthorized access or data breaches.

Comprehensive data security

Cyber-attacks and data breaches also threaten digital pathology systems and storage jeopardizing their vast amounts of confidential patient information. The risk becomes all too clear for labs and other healthcare organizations working to uphold their allegiance to regulatory compliance and professional ethics.

Those already leveraging digital pathology include: A notable cancer center accessing 40,000+ on-demand retrievals per year, a research university accessing 12,000+ on-demand retrievals per year, and a major nonprofit American academic medical center performing 5M slide backfile scans with 12M more pending.

What these pioneering organizations have realized and continue to evaluate is a way to protect patient privacy while improving access to important pathology information. As leaders in the field, they are empowering pathologists and other researchers to collaborate in the moment, securely accessing the images they need when they need them from a scalable digital image library.

Those applying a digital pathology approach understand that patient data must be secured by a storage platform both in transit and in the cloud. Iron Mountain had data security top-of-mind when it launched its Digital Pathology solutions  - a flexible combination of software, hardware, services and pathology storage. The digital images can live on secure Iron Mountain cloud storage, and the physical slides remain safe in Iron Mountain vaults delivering an end-to-end chain of custody.

Those implementing digital pathology are providing asset preservation and building a pathway for digital pathology innovations, such as advances in artificial intelligence applications. At the same time, they are respecting the fundamental and ethical standard of safeguarding patient data.

To learn more, explore the white paper, How will your organization safeguard its digital pathology data? Or, reach out to an Iron Mountain expert.