Spindle Token & Open Privacy Preserving Record Linkage | Spindle Health

**Overview**

The Open Privacy Preserving Record Linkage (OPPRL) protocol is a free and open standard for replacing personally identifiable information (PII) with encrypted tokens in order to preserve the privacy of data subjects. This capability is often refered to as "tokenization".

Healthcare and life sciences organizations use tokanization when sharing granular health data in order to associate records pertaining to the same subject without disclosing the subject's identity. It is a crucial component to preserving patient privacy.

[Spindle Health](https://spindlehealth.com/) has developed a free, open source, and scalable implementaiton of the OPPRL protocol, called [spindle-token](https://token.spindlehealth.com/). It is a Databricks compatible Python package.

**Use cases**

* Replacing PII with encrypted tokens prior to disclosing sensitive data.
* Facilitating the safe transfer of data between trusted parties, even without a secure connection.
* Isolating each organizations tokens to mitigate inter-organizational risk associated with data breaches.

**Product details**

The provided notebooks serve as user guides for how to install, setup, and use all the funcationality of spindle-token. You can find more documentation on the [project website](https://token.spindlehealth.com/) and [github](https://github.com/spindle-health/spindle-token).

Bug reports and feature requests can be made on the project's [github page](https://github.com/spindle-health/spindle-token).

If you need additional help onboarding spindle-token or the OPPRL, please [reach out to Spindle Health](https://spindlehealth.com/tokenization).

**FAQ**
*What is Tokenization?*
Tokenization is a method of protecting sensitive data by replacing it with a unique token. The goal of tokenization is to obfuscate identifying attributes or other sensitive information about the subjects described in the records of a dataset while still preserving the ability to link records pertaining to the same subject through the use of an encrypted token. The tokens are not reversible.

This practice is sometimes referred to as Privacy Preserving Record Linkage (PPRL) and is one of the components of data de-identification. Spindle created the first open standard, hence Open Privacy Preserving Record Linkage (OPPRL).

*Can spindle-token render my data fully de-identified?*
Spindle-token provides tokenization capabilities. For full de-identification, [reach out to Spindle Health](https://spindlehealth.com/tokenization).

*How does spindle-token relate to carduus?*
Spindle Health released the [carduus](https://marketplace.databricks.com/details/60ba1979-3447-4cea-98d5-3ae0a7b6b4ac/Spindle-Health_Carduus-Tokenization-Software-Open-Privacy-Preserving-Record-Linkage-) package in June 2024 as the canonical implemenation tokenization compliant with the inital version of the OPPRL protocol. Since then, the OPPRL protocol has received multiple improvements and spindle-token is a redesigned package with an improved extensible design that provides implementations of all OPPRL versions, including the same tokenization specification used by carduus. While carduus and spindle-token are interoprable and both remain available for use, future development will be focused on spindle-token.