Anonymizing Health Data: Case Studies and Methods to Get You Started

by Khaled El Emam, Luk Arbuckle

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.

225 pages, Paperback

First published October 22, 2013

Reviews

[Sergey Kochergan]

Good source of ideas for healthcare IT specialists, clinicians and those who involved into public data management.

[Rachel Childers · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book offers guides on HIPAA regulatory compliance from the only expert explicitly listed in official NIST anonymization standards, so it's probably the place to start if you need to do that. Anonymization is related to but not the same as data privacy or security, and this book is narrowly focused on the former. Even within that purview, I would still supplement with more modern resources on the technical aspects, as there have been substantial advances, particularly with non-traditional data types.

[Paul Agapow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started strong but tailed off.