Privacy Preserving Integration of Health Care Data

Abstract

For health care related research studies the medical records of patients may need to be retrieved from multiple sites with different regulations on the disclosure of health information. Given the sensitive nature of health care information, privacy is a major concern when patients’ health care data is used for research purposes. In this paper, the authors propose approaches for integration and querying of health care data from multiple sources in a secure and privacy preserving manner. In particular, the first approach ensures secure data integration based on unique identifiers, and the second one considers data integration based on quasi identifiers, for which a rule-based framework is proposed for cross-linking data records, including secure character matching.