AN OPENMINED RESEARCH INITIATIVE
The Medical Federated Learning Program

Imagine if researchers could perform research using data across hundreds of institutions without needing to acquire a copy of the data.

Today in the field of medical research, far more data exists than any particular researcher is able to use because that data is spread across thousands of medical institutions around the world. Acquiring a copy of the data from another institution is often time consuming, legally burdensome, and expensive for a variety of reasons (privacy, security, IP, competitive advantage, legal limits, to name but a few). As a result, a majority of research is conducted only on data within one or two institutions.

If we could allow researchers to conduct research across institutions without needing to acquire a copy of the data; the costs of data acquisition would decrease, the amount of data used in the typical medical research project would multiply by several orders of magnitude, and a wave of scientific breakthroughs would ensue.

We believe privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) are the key to unlocking cross-institutional collaboration. They have already been shown to facilitate cross-organization scientific collaboration at small scales (2-10 institutions), but  at their core privacy enhancing technologies are partnership enhancing technologies,  which means that they won’t actually unlock orders of magnitude more data in a scientific field until the members of that field have confidence in their efficacy, understand the positive outcomes from their own participation, and acquire the skills to actively create PET-driven data consortiums.