Patent decision

BL number

O/402/13

Concerning rights in

GB1201857.8

Hearing Officer

Mr P Slater

Decision date

9 October 2013

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Oka-bi Limited

Provisions discussed

PA 1977 Section 1(2)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The invention relates to a computer implemented system for obscuring user selected attributes within a dataset, for example, a patient’s name and address, details of their medical condition, their gender and date of birth etc. by replacing the data content with a computer generated pseudonym to create a pseudonymised database. Metadata is used to describe the various entries and/or columns within the dataset. This metadata is presented in the form of a list of all the data items and/or columns contained within the original dataset to an end user via an interface configured to allow the user to select those items of data which are to be stored in the new database along with those which are to be pseudonymised by having their content replaced by the computer generated pseudonyms. Two types of pseudonymisation are envisaged. A repeat pseudonymisation and a unique pseudonymisation. Where an item of data is unique to a particular patient, for example their NHS number, it is desirable to use the same repeating pseudonym to represent multiple occurrences of the same number. This enables data relating to a particular patient to be collated on the basis of the repeating pseudonyms without the need to restore the original dataset thus reducing the computational burden on the system. Computer executable code in the form of Structured Query Language (SQL) scripts are then created and executed in order to generate the pseudonymised database. Users with access to the database may then request permission to view the original de-pseudonymised and depending upon their access rights they will either be presented with the original data or a subset thereof pseudonymised.

The Hearing Officer considered the four-step test in Aerotel/Macrossan in the light of the Symbian judgment, and found the contribution to relate to a computer program as such, and having found no technical contribution refused the application under Section 18(3).