Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Understanding the Challenges with Medical Data Segmentation for Privacy
Ellick Chan

Citation
Ellick Chan. "Understanding the Challenges with Medical Data Segmentation for Privacy". Talk or presentation, 10, October, 2013.

Abstract
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are perceived as a path to significant improvement in healthcare, and patient privacy is an important consideration in the adoption of EHRs. Medical record segmentation is a technique to provide privacy and protect against discrimination for certain medical conditions such as STDs, substance abuse and mental health, by sequestering or redacting certain medical codes from a patient’s record. We present an initial study that describes an approach for segmenting sensitive medical codes to protect patient privacy and to comply with privacy laws. Firstly, we describe segmentation strategies for sensitive codes, and explore the link between medical concepts using sources of medical knowledge. Secondly, we mine medical knowledge sources for correlations between medical concepts. Thirdly, we describe an approach that a privacy attacker may use to infer redacted codes based off second order knowledge. More specifically, the attacker could use the presence of multiple related concepts to strengthen the attack. Finally, we evaluate defensive approaches against techniques that an adversary may use to infer the segmented condition.

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Citation formats  
  • HTML
    Ellick Chan. <a
    href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/926.html"
    ><i>Understanding the Challenges with Medical Data
    Segmentation for Privacy</i></a>, Talk or
    presentation,  10, October, 2013.
  • Plain text
    Ellick Chan. "Understanding the Challenges with Medical
    Data Segmentation for Privacy". Talk or presentation, 
    10, October, 2013.
  • BibTeX
    @presentation{Chan13_UnderstandingChallengesWithMedicalDataSegmentationFor,
        author = {Ellick Chan},
        title = {Understanding the Challenges with Medical Data
                  Segmentation for Privacy},
        day = {10},
        month = {October},
        year = {2013},
        abstract = {Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are perceived as
                  a path to significant improvement in healthcare,
                  and patient privacy is an important consideration
                  in the adoption of EHRs. Medical record
                  segmentation is a technique to provide privacy and
                  protect against discrimination for certain medical
                  conditions such as STDs, substance abuse and
                  mental health, by sequestering or redacting
                  certain medical codes from a patient’s record.
                  We present an initial study that describes an
                  approach for segmenting sensitive medical codes to
                  protect patient privacy and to comply with privacy
                  laws. Firstly, we describe segmentation strategies
                  for sensitive codes, and explore the link between
                  medical concepts using sources of medical
                  knowledge. Secondly, we mine medical knowledge
                  sources for correlations between medical concepts.
                  Thirdly, we describe an approach that a privacy
                  attacker may use to infer redacted codes based off
                  second order knowledge. More specifically, the
                  attacker could use the presence of multiple
                  related concepts to strengthen the attack.
                  Finally, we evaluate defensive approaches against
                  techniques that an adversary may use to infer the
                  segmented condition.},
        URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/926.html}
    }
    

Posted by Carolyn Winter on 18 Nov 2013.
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