Never too old for anonymity: a statistical standard for demographic data sharing via the HIPAA Privacy Rule

Objective Healthcare organizations must de-identify patient records before sharing data. Many organizations rely on the Safe Harbor Standard of the HIPAAPrivacy Rule, which enumerates 18 identifiers that must be suppressed (eg, ages over 89). An alternative model in the Privacy Rule, known as the Statistical Standard, can facilitate the sharing of more detailed data, but is rarely applied because of a lack of published methodologies. The authors propose an intuitive approach to de-identifying patient demographics in accordance with the Statistical Standard. Design The authors conduct an analysis of the demographics of patient cohorts in five medical centers developed for the NIH-sponsored Electronic Medical Records and Genomics network, with respect to the US census. They report the re-identification risk of patient demographics disclosed according to the Safe Harbor policy and the relative risk rate for sharing such information via alternative policies. Measurements The re-identi�...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: JAMIA
• Authors: Bradley Malin, Kathleen Benitez, Daniel R. Masys
• Keywords: Algorithms, Electronic Medical Records, JAMIA 2011, Patient Demographics, Population Statistics