Framework Design and Case Study for Privacy-Preserving Medical Data Publishing

With the pervasive using of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and telemedicine technologies, more and more digital healthcare data are accumulated from multiple sources. As healthcare data is valuable for both commercial and scientific research, the demand of sharing healthcare data has been growing rapidly. Nevertheless, health care data normally contains a large amount of personal information, and sharing them directly would bring huge threaten to the patient privacy. This paper proposes a privacy preserving framework for medical data sharing with the view of practical application. The framework focuses on three key issues of privacy protection during the data sharing, which are privacy definition/detection, privacy policy management, and privacy preserving data publishing. A case study for Chinese Electronic Medical Record (ERM) publishing with privacy preserving is implemented based on the proposed framework. Specific Chinese free text EMR segmentation, Protected Health Information (PHI) extraction, and K-anonymity PHI anonymous algorithms are proposed in each component. The real-life data from hospitals are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework and system.