Evaluating the risk of patient re-identification from adverse drug event reports.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Our objective was to develop a model for measuring re-identification risk that more closely mimics the behaviour of an adversary by accounting for repeated attempts at matching and verification of matches, and apply it to evaluate the risk of re-identification for Canada's post-marketing adverse drug event database (ADE).Re-identification is only demonstrably plausible for deaths in ADE. A matching experiment between ADE records and virtual obituaries constructed from Statistics Canada vital statistics was simulated. A new re-identification risk is considered, it assumes that after gathering all the potential matches for a patient record (all records in the obituaries that are potential matches for an ADE record), an adversary tries to verify these potential matches. Two

SUBMITTER: El Emam K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4137558 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature