Anonymizing Health Data

Updated as of August 2014, this practical book will demonstrate proven methods for anonymizing health data to help your organization share meaningful datasets, without exposing patient identity. Leading experts Khaled El Emam and Luk Arbuckle walk you through a risk-based methodology, using case studies from their efforts to de-identify hundreds of datasets. Clinical data is valuable for research and other types of analytics, but making it anonymous without compromising data quality is tricky. This book demonstrates techniques for handling different data types, based on the authors’ experiences with a maternal-child registry, inpatient discharge abstracts, health insurance claims, electronic medical record databases, and the World Trade Center disaster registry, among others. Understand different methods for working with cross-sectional and longitudinal datasets Assess the risk of adversaries who attempt to re-identify patients in anonymized datasets Reduce the size and complexity of massive datasets without losing key information or jeopardizing privacy Use methods to anonymize unstructured free-form text data Minimize the risks inherent in geospatial data, without omitting critical location-based health information Look at ways to anonymize coding information in health data Learn the challenge of anonymously linking related datasets

Anonymization of Electronic Medical Records to Support Clinical Analysis closely examines the privacy threats that may arise from medical data sharing, and surveys the state-of-the-art methods developed to safeguard data against these threats. To motivate the need for computational methods, the book first explores the main challenges facing the privacy-protection of medical data using the existing policies, practices and regulations. Then, it takes an in-depth look at the popular computational privacy-preserving methods that have been developed for demographic, clinical and genomic data sharing, and closely analyzes the privacy principles behind these methods, as well as the optimization and algorithmic strategies that they employ. Finally, through a series of in-depth case studies that highlight data from the US Census as well as the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the book outlines a new, innovative class of privacy-preserving methods designed to ensure the integrity of transferred medical data for subsequent analysis, such as discovering or validating associations between clinical and genomic information. Anonymization of Electronic Medical Records to Support Clinical Analysis is intended for professionals as a reference guide for safeguarding the privacy and data integrity of sensitive medical records. Academics and other research scientists will also find the book invaluable.

How can you use data in a way that protects individual privacy but still provides useful and meaningful analytics? With this practical book, data architects and engineers will learn how to establish and integrate secure, repeatable anonymization processes into their data flows and analytics in a sustainable manner. Luk Arbuckle and Khaled El Emam from Privacy Analytics explore end-to-end solutions for anonymizing device and IoT data, based on collection models and use cases that address real business needs. These examples come from some of the most demanding data environments, such as healthcare, using approaches that have withstood the test of time. Create anonymization solutions diverse enough to cover a spectrum of use cases Match your solutions to the data you use, the people you share it with, and your analysis goals Build anonymization pipelines around various data collection models to cover different business needs Generate an anonymized version of original data or use an analytics platform to generate anonymized outputs Examine the ethical issues around the use of anonymized data

Due to the digitization of medical records, more and more health data is readily available. This dynamic has created many opportunities to unlock this information and use it to improve medical practice, and through research and surveillance understand the effectiveness and side effects of drugs and medical devices to ultimately improve the public’s health. This data can also be used for commercial purposes such as sales and marketing. However, this newfound utility raises some profound questions about how this data ought to be used and how it will impact personal privacy. Unless we are able to address these privacy issues in a convincing and defensible way, there will be increased breaches of personal privacy. This will provoke regulators to impose new rules limiting the use and disclosure of health data for secondary purposes, patients increasingly to adopt privacy protective behaviours because they no longer trust how their health information is being managed, or healthcare providers to be reluctant to share their patients’ data. By adopting responsible data sharing practices, researchers, companies and the general public can gain the benefits and the promise of big data analytics without sacrificing personal privacy or infringing upon law or regulation. Risky Business – Sharing Health Data While Protecting Privacy illustrates how this goal can be achieved. Bringing articles from a diverse collection of health data experts to inform the reader on contemporary policy, legal and technical issues surrounding health information privacy and data sharing. It is a uniquely practical work to inform the reader on how best – and how not to – share health data in the US and Canada.

The Complete Book of Data Anonymization: From Planning to Implementation supplies a 360-degree view of data privacy protection using data anonymization. It examines data anonymization from both a practitioner's and a program sponsor's perspective. Discussing analysis, planning, setup, and governance, it illustrates the entire process of adapting and implementing anonymization tools and programs. Part I of the book begins by explaining what data anonymization is. It describes how to scope a data anonymization program as well as the challenges involved when planning for this initiative at an enterprisewide level. Part II describes the different solution patterns and techniques available for data anonymization. It explains how to select a pattern and technique and provides a phased approach towards data anonymization for an application. A cutting-edge guide to data anonymization implementation, this book delves far beyond data anonymization techniques to supply you with the wide-ranging perspective required to ensure comprehensive protection against misuse of data.

Offering compelling practical and legal reasons why de-identification should be one of the main approaches to protecting patients' privacy, the Guide to the De-Identification of Personal Health Information outlines a proven, risk-based methodology for the de-identification of sensitive health information. It situates and contextualizes this risk-ba

The need for quality improvement and for cost saving are driving both individual choices and health system dynamics. The health services research that we need to support informed choices depends on access to data, but at the same time, individual privacy and patient-health care provider confidentiality must be protected.

This handbook covers Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, which enable the storage, management, and sharing of massive amounts of demographic, diagnosis, medication, and genomic information. It presents privacy-preserving methods for medical data, ranging from laboratory test results to doctors’ comments. The reuse of EMR data can greatly benefit medical science and practice, but must be performed in a privacy-preserving way according to data sharing policies and regulations. Written by world-renowned leaders in this field, each chapter offers a survey of a research direction or a solution to problems in established and emerging research areas. The authors explore scenarios and techniques for facilitating the anonymization of different types of medical data, as well as various data mining tasks. Other chapters present methods for emerging data privacy applications and medical text de-identification, including detailed surveys of deployed systems. A part of the book is devoted to legislative and policy issues, reporting on the US and EU privacy legislation and the cost of privacy breaches in the healthcare domain. This reference is intended for professionals, researchers and advanced-level students interested in safeguarding medical data.