A secure protocol for protecting the identity of providers when disclosing data for disease surveillance

Background Providers have been reluctant to disclose patient data for public-health purposes. Even if patient privacy is ensured, the desire to protect provider confidentiality has been an important driver of this reluctance. Methods Six requirements for a surveillance protocol were defined that satisfy the confidentiality needs of providers and ensure utility to public health. The authors developed a secure multi-party computation protocol using the Paillier cryptosystem to allow the disclosure of stratified case counts and denominators to meet these requirements. The authors evaluated the protocol in a simulated environment on its computation performance and ability to detect disease outbreak clusters. Results Theoretical and empirical assessments demonstrate that all requirements are met by the protocol. A system implementing the protocol scales linearly in terms of computation time as the number of providers is increased. The absolute time to perform the computations was 12.5 ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: JAMIA
• Authors: Khaled El Emam, Jun Hu, Jay Mercer, Liam Peyton, Murat Kantarcioglu, Bradley Malin, David Buckeridge, Saeed Samet, Craig Earle
• Keywords: Algorithms, Disease Outbreak, JAMIA 2011, Outbreak Clusters, Public Health Purposes