In a Master Class held in the European Hematology Association’s head office in The Hague, GMV explained to representatives of the HARMONY patient cluster about the handling of blood-cancer-patient data now being uploaded onto the platform designed by the company. Ana Heredia, GMV’s healthcare data scientist, fielded questions like: What type of data does HARMONY expect to obtain? Is the data secure on the platform?

She also told the audience about GMV’s work to meet HARMONY’s remit, i.e., setting up a Europe-wide repository with longitudinal data on seven hematological diseases and mining this data to answer such questions as all the following: Which measures should be taken to improve patient healthcare and their quality of life? How can patients be diagnosed more quickly and precisely? How can the innovative-drug development process be speeded up?

She explained the technological challenges that the company has taken on and solved in collaboration with the project’s ethical and legal committees due to “the sensitive nature of the data to be dealt with” abiding at all times by “the security and privacy demands laid down in the applicable legislation at European level, both in designing the platform and in data intake and processing”.

To reassure patients worried about the privacy of their data, GMV’s data scientist pointed out that the HARMONY alliance has set up an anonymization model that “by a combination of technical and organizational measures manages to ensure that any attempt to re-identify patients would be prohibitively time-consuming and call for a huge and disproportionate effort”.

As for the type of data that the alliance expects to obtain, she confirmed that “the HARMONY alliance is working to build up demographic data, information on the quality of life, diagnosis information, details of the treatment received and omics data input by universities, research centers, industry and other participating groups”. The joint analysis of this data “will reveal markers that will help to take decisions on the application of treatment best suited to the particular disease of each patient”.

Also, in the interests of improving the HARMONY platform user experience, Ana Heredia carried out a demonstration of all its applications and dealt with any doubts that cropped up.