An 'eHarmony' for clinical trials.  How many more ill people would participate in a clinical trial if: a) they had access to a web-matching service to help them find just the right one? and b) such a service included iron clad privacy? Robert Shelton thinks this answer is many. We think he's right. Shelton's company Private Access is trying to strike a new balance between the need to access information, like medical records data, can the competing desire to keep patient privacy in tact. He's built something he calls a "privacy aware architecture" which takes discretionary information from parties and facilitates "blind" matching between them, while at the same time keeping other data protected (rather like a dating service). One use for Private Access is by researchers, who can use it to recruit clinical trial candidates in a more cost-effective manner. Patients may now search for trials more aggressively, with the comfort that only certain bits of their personal information will be shared. We need this: Enacct says only 3 percent of cancer patients participate in clinical trials. That's not enough.

Speaking to highlighthealth.com: "It is also a play on the words “privacy” and “access,” which most people tend to think of as being a 'pick one or the other' choice, whereas we believe that both attributes can and must be achieved if we’re ever going to truly transform healthcare to function with less cost and greater efficiency."