MINI REVIEW article
Front. Drug Saf. Regul.
Sec. Advanced Methods in Pharmacovigilance and Pharmacoepidemiology
Volume 5 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdsfr.2025.1599217
This article is part of the Research TopicChallenges and Opportunities of Tokenization to Enhance the Benefit-Risk Assessment of MedicinesView all articles
Tokenization Techniques for Privacy-Preserving Healthcare Data: Tokenization Nuts and Bolts
Provisionally accepted
- LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Alpharetta, United States
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Tokenization is a crucial technology for ensuring the security and privacy of patient data in clinical research, pharmacovigilance, and drug safety monitoring. As healthcare increasingly integrates diverse data sources-ranging from clinical records to non-clinical data such as social determinants of health (SDOH)-it is essential to protect sensitive patient information while improving data quality and analysis (National Institutes of Health, 2006). This article emphasizes tokenization's critical role in safeguarding privacy, particularly in pharmacovigilance activities including safety monitoring, risk assessment, and post-market surveillance. Beyond security, tokenization enriches research datasets by enabling integration of external information, thereby enhancing the rigor and reliability of pharmacovigilance outcomes. With effective tokenization, researchers can better protect patients while gaining deeper insights into clinical and pharmacological research (Cruz et al., 2024).Recent global applications validate tokenization as a foundational privacy-preserving technology in pharmacovigilance. An applied example from a psoriasis clinical trial demonstrated referential tokenization's capacity to securely link electronic health records (EHRs) and claims data across systems with greater than 99% linkage precision while maintaining privacy standards (D'Andrea et al., 2024).These capabilities align with emerging international frameworks, including the European Health Data Space (2025), reinforcing tokenization's value in generating regulatory-grade evidence for pharmacovigilance across national and multinational research environments. In many jurisdictions, tokenization that meets de-identification or pseudonymization standards may not require individual patient consent, though this varies based on data sensitivity, jurisdictional law, and the study's intent (Office for Civil Rights, 2023; EDPB, 2021).
Keywords: tokenization, real-world data (RWD), linking, Privacy, Pharmocovigilance, Health Economics
Received: 24 Mar 2025; Accepted: 25 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Cook. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Camille Cook, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Alpharetta, United States
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