Mapping health data: improved privacy protection with donut method geomasking.

ABSTRACT: A major challenge in mapping health data is protecting patient privacy while maintaining the spatial resolution necessary for spatial surveillance and outbreak identification. A new adaptive geomasking technique, referred to as the donut method, extends current methods of random displacement by ensuring a user-defined minimum level of geoprivacy. In donut method geomasking, each geocoded address is relocated in a random direction by at least a minimum distance, but less than a maximum distance. The authors compared the donut method with current methods of random perturbation and aggregation regarding measures of privacy protection and cluster detection performance by masking multiple disease field simulations under a range of parameters. Both the donut method and random perturbation perfor

SUBMITTER: Hampton KH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2984253 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature