Barth-Jones, Daniel. "The Debate Over ‘Re-Identification’ Of Health Information: What Do We Risk?" Health Affairs, August 10, 2012.
From the article: "Because a vast array of healthcare improvements and medical
research critically depend on de-identified health information, the essential
public policy challenge then is to accurately assess the current state of
privacy protections for de-identified data, and properly balance both risks and
benefits to maximum effect…Considerable costs come with incorrectly evaluating
the true risks of re-identification under current HIPAA protections. It is
essential to understand that de-identification comes at a cost to the
scientific accuracy and quality of the healthcare decisions that will be made
based on research using de-identified data. Balancing disclosure risks and
statistical accuracy is crucial because some popular de-identification methods,
such as “k-anonymity methods,” can unnecessarily, and often undetectably,
degrade the accuracy of de-identified data for multivariate statistical
analyses. This problem is well understood by statisticians and computer
scientists, but not well-appreciated in the public policy arena. Poorly
conducted de-identification and the overuse of de-identification methods in
cases where they do not produce real privacy protections can quickly lead to
“bad science” and damaging policy decisions.
Even worse, if we abandon the use of de-identified data because we falsely
believe that de-identification cannot provide valuable privacy protections, we
will lose the rich benefits that come from analysis of de-identified health
data." Read more
