Designing privacy for scalable electronic healthcare linkage

A unified electronic health record (EHR) has potentially immeasurable benefits to society, and the current healthcare industry drive to create a single EHR reflects this. However, adoption is slow due to two major factors: the disparate nature of data and storage facilities of current healthcare systems and the security ramifications of accessing and using that data and concerns about potential misuse of that data. To attempt to address these issues this paper presents the VANGUARD (Virtual ANonymisation Grid for Unified Access of Remote Data) system which supports adaptive security-oriented linkage of disparate clinical data-sets to support a variety of virtual EHRs avoiding the need for a single schematic standard and natural concerns of data owners and other stakeholders on data access and usage. VANGUARD has been designed explicit with security in mind and supports clear delineation of roles for data linkage and usage

Examining Disclosure Risk and Data Utility: An Administrative Data Case Study

The plethora of new data sources, combined with a growing interest in increased access to previously unpublished data, poses a set of ethical challenges regarding individual privacy. This paper sets out one aspect of those challenges: the need to anonymise data in such a form that protects the privacy of individuals while providing sufficient data utility for data users. This issue is discussed using a case study of Scottish Government’s administrative data, in which disclosure risk is examined and data utility is assessed using a potential ‘real-world’ analysis

SEMANTIC INTEROPERABILITY AND DATA MAPPING IN EHR SYSTEMS

The diversity in representation of medical data prevents straightforward data mapping, standardization and interoperability between the heterogeneous systems. We identify a specific problem, namely the need to achieve interoperability by applying a standard based data modeling approach to achieve a common platform that serves to improve the health data mapping of unstructured data and addresses ambiguity issues when dealing with health data from heterogeneous systems. In this thesis, we proposed an original Hybrid algorithm that identifies the attributes of data in heterogeneous systems based on critical medical standards and protocols and then performs semantic integration to form a uniform interoperable system. Also, efficient data modeling techniques are introduced for improving data storage and extraction. We tested the proposed algorithm with multiple data sets and compared the proposed approach with traditional data modeling approaches. We found that the proposed approach demonstrated performance improvements and reduction in data losses