Anonymization of longitudinal electronic medical records

Tamersoy, Acar and Loukides, Grigorios and Nergiz, Mehmet Ercan and Saygın, Yücel and Malin, Bradley (2012) Anonymization of longitudinal electronic medical records. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 16 (3). pp. 413-423. ISSN 1089-7771

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Abstract

Electronic medical record (EMR) systems have enabled healthcare providers to collect detailed patient information from the primary care domain. At the same time, longitudinal data from EMRs are increasingly combined with biorepositories to generate personalized clinical decision support protocols. Emerging policies encourage investigators to disseminate such data in a deidentified form for reuse and collaboration, but organizations are hesitant to do so because they fear such actions will jeopardize patient privacy. In particular, there are concerns that residual demographic and clinical features could be exploited for reidentification purposes. Various approaches have been developed to anonymize clinical data, but they neglect temporal information and are, thus, insufficient for emerging biomedical research paradigms. This paper proposes a novel approach to share patient-specific longitudinal data that offers robust privacy guarantees, while preserving data utility for many biomedical investigations. Our approach aggregates temporal and diagnostic information using heuristics inspired from sequence alignment and clustering methods. We demonstrate that the proposed approach can generate anonymized data that permit effective biomedical analysis using several patient cohorts derived from the EMR system of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Anonymization; data privacy; electronic medical records (EMRs); longitudinal data
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA075 Electronic computers. Computer science
Divisions: Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences > Academic programs > Computer Science & Eng.
Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences
Depositing User: Yücel Saygın
Date Deposited: 21 Jun 2012 16:18
Last Modified: 31 Jul 2019 11:02
URI: https://research.sabanciuniv.edu/id/eprint/19119

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