Guide to the De-Identification of Personal Health Information

Offering compelling practical and legal reasons why de-identification should be one of the main approaches to protecting patients’ privacy, this book outlines a proven, risk-based methodology for the de-identification of sensitive health information. The book contextualizes this risk-based methodology and provides a general overview of its steps. The author supplies a detailed case for why de-identification is important as well as best practices to help readers pinpoint when it is necessary to apply de-identification in the disclosure of personal health information.

Offering compelling practical and legal reasons why de-identification should be one of the main approaches to protecting patients’ privacy, the Guide to the De-Identification of Personal Health Information outlines a proven, risk-based methodology for the de-identification of sensitive health information. It situates and contextualizes this risk-based methodology and provides a general overview of its steps.

The book supplies a detailed case for why de-identification is important as well as best practices to help you pin point when it is necessary to apply de-identification in the disclosure of personal health information. It also:

• Outlines practical methods for de-identification
• Describes how to measure re-identification risk
• Explains how to reduce the risk of re-identification
• Includes proofs and supporting reference material
• Focuses only on transformations proven to work on health information—rather than covering all possible approaches, whether they work in practice or not

Rated the top systems and software engineering scholar worldwide by The Journal of Systems and Software, Dr. El Emam is one of only a handful of individuals worldwide qualified to de-identify personal health information for secondary use under the HIPAA Privacy Rule Statistical Standard. In this book Dr. El Emam explains how we can make health data more accessible—while protecting patients’ privacy and complying with current regulations.