The chief of a Chinese health care payments firm explained the procedures his company uses to protect patient data, calling that information "one of the key things we have to defend."
IHD Pay makes a digital payment system designed to cut costs for the health industry and reduce waiting times for patients. But holding those patients' data is a huge responsibility, especially in an era of high-profile cyberattacks.
"We pay tremendous amounts of attention ... to make sure that data privacy is well protected," Eric Ho, the group CEO at IHD Pay, said at the East Tech West conference in the Nansha district of Guangzhou, China.
Ho said the company removes individuals' identifying traits from the medical data it holds.
"We would take away the name, the identification number of the patient in question. So we only look at the general data, and then we will develop different algorithms to ... mine those data, " he told CNBC's Chery Kang.
Ho described individual patients' data as "one of the key things we have to defend."
