The official journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Publishes peer-reviewed research for biomedical and health informatics. Coverage includes

I finished Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma on Friday, and it’s got me thinking again about professional ethics and public engagement in the archives and records management community. After an exchange of…

TechPresident covers the entire spectrum of the digital lifestyle and brings its readers closer to the world of technology with experience.

Life insurers are testing a new use for data about Americans: predicting longevity. A Deloitte test evaluated applicants based on data about things like  online shopping and magazine subscriptions. 10th in a series.

Personal information doesn't get much more personal than your medical history. Ensuring your medical records are secure remains a top priorty for the Federal Trade Commission as they settled their…

Lack of clinical-trial data sharing meant a lot of taxpayer money wasted on Tamiflu stockpiles.

Producing a widely used set of data, rather than a long list of self-written articles, he said, "should be the highest honor in our field."

Telling lies with data.

This page provides guidance about methods and approaches to achieve de-identification in accordance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy Rule. The guidance explains and answers questions regarding the two methods that can be used to satisfy the Privacy Rule’s de-identification standard: Expert Determination and Safe Harbor . This guidance is intended to assist covered entities to understand what is de-identification, the general process by which de-identified information is created, and the options available for performing de-identification.

Background Privacy legislation in most jurisdictions allows the disclosure of health data for secondary purposes without patient consent if it is de-identified. Some recent articles in the medical, legal, and computer science literature have argued that de-identification methods do not provide sufficient protection because they are easy to reverse. Should this be the case, it would have significant and important implications on how health information is disclosed, including: (a) potentially limiting its availability for secondary purposes such as research, and (b) resulting in more identifiable health information being disclosed. Our objectives in this systematic review were to: (a) characterize known re-identification attacks on health data and contrast that to re-identification attacks on other kinds of data, (b) compute the overall proportion of records that have been correctly re-identified in these attacks, and (c) assess whether these demonstrate weaknesses in current de-identification methods.   Methods and Findings Searches were conducted in IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, and PubMed. After screening, fourteen eligible articles representing distinct attacks were identified. On average, approximately a quarter of the records were re-identified across all studies (0.26 with 95% CI 0.046–0.478) and 0.34 for attacks on health data (95% CI 0–0.744). There was considerable uncertainty around the proportions as evidenced by the wide confidence intervals, and the mean proportion of records re-identified was sensitive to unpublished studies. Two of fourteen attacks were performed with data that was de-identified using existing standards. Only one of these attacks was on health data, which resulted in a success rate of 0.00013.   Conclusions The current evidence shows a high re-identification rate but is dominated by small-scale studies on data that was not de-identified according to existing standards. This evidence is insufficient to draw conclusions about the efficacy of de-identification methods.

An open book. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The Institute of Medicine sponsored a workshop today that is focused on the sharing of clinical research data. I had the opportunity to share my thoughts on the importance of open science and our responsibility to ensure that information that is critical to decisions people [...]