Both clinical and research uses of genomics and health data require co-analysis with large pools of data, but participant privacy and the need for data custodian controls remain paramount.
In this poster we present the Canadian Distributed Infrastructure for Genomics (CanDIG), a driver project and a developing, federated, fully distributed platform to allow national-scale, privacy-maintaining analyses of locally-controlled data sets in the Canadian federal context. CanDIG connects sites at McGill University, Hospital for Sick Children, UHN Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, Jewish General Hospital and Université de Sherbrooke.
By sending queries to the data, we enable truly national-scale analysis of private health data in Canada, where provincial health data privacy protections can make it difficult for clinical data to leave the province it was collected in. As privacy protections are built in from the very beginning, we make it easier for health data stewards to justify allowing their data to be part of some remote analyses - granular control of the amount of data and information being released, and to whom, is a fundamental part of the overall design.