A Privacy-Preserved Analytical Method for eHealth Database with Minimized Information Loss

• Published in: BioMed research international Vol. 2012; no. 2012; pp. 1 - 9
• Main Authors: Chen, Ya-Ling, Cheng, Bo-Chao, Chen, Hsueh-Lin, Lin, Chia-I, Liao, Guo-Tan, Hou, Bo-Yu, Hsu, Shih-Chun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cairo, Egypt Hindawi Puplishing Corporation 01.01.2012; Hindawi Publishing Corporation; Hindawi Limited
• Subjects: Computer Security; Confidentiality; Databases, Factual; Electronic Health Records; Identity theft; Information management; Information Storage and Retrieval - methods; Internet; Medical records; Medical research; Methods; Privacy; Privacy, Right of; Risk assessment; Studies; Taiwan; User-Computer Interface; Taiwan
• ISSN: 1110-7243; 2314-6133; 1110-7251; 2314-6141
• DOI: 10.1155/2012/521267

Digitizing medical information is an emerging trend that employs information and communication technology (ICT) to manage health records, diagnostic reports, and other medical data more effectively, in order to improve the overall quality of medical services. However, medical information is highly confidential and involves private information, even legitimate access to data raises privacy concerns. Medical records provide health information on an as-needed basis for diagnosis and treatment, and the information is also important for medical research and other health management applications. Traditional privacy risk management systems have focused on reducing reidentification risk, and they do not consider information loss. In addition, such systems cannot identify and isolate data that carries high risk of privacy violations. This paper proposes the Hiatus Tailor (HT) system, which ensures low re-identification risk for medical records, while providing more authenticated information to database users and identifying high-risk data in the database for better system management. The experimental results demonstrate that the HT system achieves much lower information loss than traditional risk management methods, with the same risk of re-identification.