Assessing and Anonymizing Personal Health Data for the “Greater Good”

Privacy Analytics wants to make it easier and less risky to share and analyze the massive amount of health care data that can help life sciences companies and health care organizations address health and safety issues. The company is not doing analytics itself, as the name may suggest, but providing software and risk management consulting services for “anonymizing personal health data.” The “privacy” is in masking the identity of the original patients on whom the data is collected, and on measuring the level of risk of de-identification and even re-identification. An example, and one of Privacy Analytics’ users is CancerLinq, which pulls in data from databases across the U.S. and makes it available for research, education, and analysis.

Direct identifiers such as name and social security numbers are obvious to protect; however there are other data points that can be used to identify people, such as dates of visits and tests done during a visit to the emergency room. If someone is studying heart disease and wants to look at sequential visits, tests, and treatments, for example, there is a certain level of granularity needed for the analysis, but patterns can also pick up identities. Privacy Analytics assesses the risk of this type of secondary or re-identification as well.

Protecting health data is one of the most sensitive topics today. Someone’s health data is so personal, and yet, if shared broadly, can be incredibly helpful as part of a broader data set to identify patterns and opportunities to prevent, intervene, diagnose, treat, and cure diseases. Organizations need to be able to balance caution in protecting data with using it for the “greater good.”

By law, organizations need to protect the identity of patients, yet the data can possibly help them and/or others if used for research and analysis. This solution helps determine the risk of identification so that appropriate mitigation and management can be put in place, increasing the level of security and digital trust, what we consider “Holistic Security.” It has the additional value of enabling secure data to then be accessible and actionable. Holistic Security and Accessible and Actionable Data are two of what HfS identifies as Ideals of the As-a-Service Economy, enabling companies to drive towards new outcomes and results in a secure and flexible manner.

We think that Privacy Analytics has found a relevant and interesting niche to address in today’s health care and life sciences market that is increasingly focused on how to better secure and use data to drive new outcomes.