The Clinical Audit Tool encryption, de-identification and geocoding process ensures that any patient data leaving a practice is kept secure and private, whilst also allowing aggregation and geospatial representation of this data.
The process may be summarised as follows:
- Data is collected from the clinical information system and saved as an encrypted extract file
- Data is de-identified via the FAT CAT process (Filtering and Anonymisation Tool for CAT)
- The de-identified data is tagged with a unique and encrypted code that can be matched with a geographical location in PAT CAT
- Data is aggregated in PAT CAT