Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing for Medical Research

Abstract

Electronic patient medical records contain vast amounts of information of potential value to researchers striving to increase understanding of diseases, treatments, and outcomes. Effective use of such data is limited by privacy and technical concerns. Privacy laws require the removal of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from the released data. Technical concerns are that the data must be abstracted for consistency across different providers. To be most useful, data from different providers for the same patient must be linked together. This paper applies cryptographic techniques to the problem of privacy-preserving linking of medical records.