Zuellig Pharma Digital & Data has launched Digital Health Exchange (DHEX), the first regional healthcare data consortium in Asia powered by Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) and Confidential Computing.
DHEX is the first use case under the PET Sandbox initiative by Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). The newly-formed consortium seeks to connect data partners with data consumers to accelerate seamless access to actionable healthcare insights and intelligence.
DHEX hopes to pave the way for data democratisation and insight innovation for healthcare in Asia.
“PET Sandbox initiative is a great platform for data partners, as it not only creates a secure and compliant way for more players in the healthcare industry to spearhead innovation in their respective fields but also drives solutions that make healthcare more accessible,” said John Graham, CEO of Zuellig Pharma.
Welcoming Zuellig Pharma to the PET Sandbox program, IMDA chief executive Lew Chuen Hong pointed out PETs are a set of technologies that help businesses to access data and derive new insights or build new AI products while ensuring trust.
“Through PETs, Zuellig Pharma and its clients are able to tap on external data sources to enhance their market strategy for new pharmaceutical products, at the same time protecting patient data," said Chew.
"This demonstrates how the technology can help businesses to innovate with data while ensuring data protection for consumers, both of which are essential to our burgeoning digital economy."
Lew Chuen Hong
Making healthcare data accessible
To date, no healthcare data platform has been made available in Asia. This is a major gap that the newly launched DHEX is trying to fill. For many years, data partners are challenged with a lack of technological capabilities and data-compliant processes while data consumers are faced with varied tech maturity and development, and a lack of trust.
“Many problems we see today with data access is the presence of data silos and the lack of quality healthcare data from data partners for data consumers,” said Daniel Laverick, chief digital and data officer at Zuellig Pharma.
"With business intelligence at the forefront in our development, we are rethinking how businesses can gain access to comprehensive data assets, expertise, and technology to deliver commercial excellence, market access excellence and medical excellence in an agile manner."
Daniel Laverick
Through the PET Sandbox initiative, Zuellig Pharma Digital & Data aims for DHEX to establish standards and best practices for the wider adoption of PET.
Leveraging PET, with compliance to data privacy and competition laws, the DHEX consortium democratises data by harnessing the value of data from data partners including healthcare providers and Zuellig Pharma itself, across 13 markets through advanced analytics that would foster a secure collaborative ecosystem to deliver data-centric excellence.
“Adopting PET helps to ensure that data remains confidential in trusted environments – allowing businesses to extract value from data without exposing the data itself, which thereby protects personal data and commercially sensitive information in an industry like healthcare,” said Michael Andrew, head of data analytics at Zuellig Pharma.
"This technology increases the options for business-to-business (B2B) data collaboration through flexible partnership models and enabling secured encrypted transfer and cross-border data flows – providing accessibility to curated datasets or aggregated insights to help users connect the dots."
Michael Andrew
