Evaluation of the Privacy Risks of Personal Health Identifiers and Quasi-Identifiers in a Distributed Research Network: Development and Validation Study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Privacy should be protected in medical data that include patient information. A distributed research network (DRN) is one of the challenges in privacy protection and in the encouragement of multi-institutional clinical research. A DRN standardizes multi-institutional data into a common structure and terminology called a common data model (CDM), and it only shares analysis results. It is necessary to measure how a DRN protects patient information privacy even without sharing data in practice.

Objective

This study aimed to quantify the privacy risk of a DRN by comparing different deidentification levels focusing on personal health identifiers (PHIs) and quasi-identifiers (QIs).

Methods

We detected PHIs and QIs in an Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership

SUBMITTER: Oh S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8204238 | biostudies-literature | 2021 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature