Anonymizing healthcare data: a case study on the blood transfusion service

  • Authors:
  • Noman Mohammed;Benjamin C.M. Fung;Patrick C.K. Hung;Cheuk-kwong Lee

  • Affiliations:
  • Concordia University, Montreal, PQ, Canada;Concordia University, Montreal, PQ, Canada;University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, ON, Canada;Hong Kong Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service, Hong Kong, China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Sharing healthcare data has become a vital requirement in healthcare system management; however, inappropriate sharing and usage of healthcare data could threaten patients' privacy. In this paper, we study the privacy concerns of the blood transfusion information-sharing system between the Hong Kong Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service (BTS) and public hospitals, and identify the major challenges that make traditional data anonymization methods not applicable. Furthermore, we propose a new privacy model called LKC-privacy, together with an anonymization algorithm, to meet the privacy and information requirements in this BTS case. Experiments on the real-life data demonstrate that our anonymization algorithm can effectively retain the essential information in anonymous data for data analysis and is scalable for anonymizing large datasets.