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Evaluating the risk of patient re-identification from adverse drug event reports

BACKGROUND: Our objective was to develop a model for measuring re-identification risk that more closely mimics the behaviour of an adversary by accounting for repeated attempts at matching and verification of matches, and apply it to evaluate the risk of re-identification for Canada’s post-marketing...

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Autores principales: El Emam, Khaled, Dankar, Fida K, Neisa, Angelica, Jonker, Elizabeth
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4137558/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24094134
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6947-13-114
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author El Emam, Khaled
Dankar, Fida K
Neisa, Angelica
Jonker, Elizabeth
author_facet El Emam, Khaled
Dankar, Fida K
Neisa, Angelica
Jonker, Elizabeth
author_sort El Emam, Khaled
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Our objective was to develop a model for measuring re-identification risk that more closely mimics the behaviour of an adversary by accounting for repeated attempts at matching and verification of matches, and apply it to evaluate the risk of re-identification for Canada’s post-marketing adverse drug event database (ADE).Re-identification is only demonstrably plausible for deaths in ADE. A matching experiment between ADE records and virtual obituaries constructed from Statistics Canada vital statistics was simulated. A new re-identification risk is considered, it assumes that after gathering all the potential matches for a patient record (all records in the obituaries that are potential matches for an ADE record), an adversary tries to verify these potential matches. Two adversary scenarios were considered: (a) a mildly motivated adversary who will stop after one verification attempt, and (b) a highly motivated adversary who will attempt to verify all the potential matches and is only limited by practical or financial considerations. METHODS: The mean percentage of records in ADE that had a high probability of being re-identified was computed. RESULTS: Under scenario (a), the risk of re-identification from disclosing the province, age at death, gender, and exact date of the report is quite high, but the removal of province brings down the risk significantly. By only generalizing the date of reporting to month and year and including all other variables, the risk is always low. All ADE records have a high risk of re-identification under scenario (b), but the plausibility of that scenario is limited because of the financial and practical deterrent even for highly motivated adversaries. CONCLUSIONS: It is possible to disclose Canada’s adverse drug event database while ensuring that plausible re-identification risks are acceptably low. Our new re-identification risk model is suitable for such risk assessments.
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spelling pubmed-41375582014-08-28 Evaluating the risk of patient re-identification from adverse drug event reports El Emam, Khaled Dankar, Fida K Neisa, Angelica Jonker, Elizabeth BMC Med Inform Decis Mak Research Article BACKGROUND: Our objective was to develop a model for measuring re-identification risk that more closely mimics the behaviour of an adversary by accounting for repeated attempts at matching and verification of matches, and apply it to evaluate the risk of re-identification for Canada’s post-marketing adverse drug event database (ADE).Re-identification is only demonstrably plausible for deaths in ADE. A matching experiment between ADE records and virtual obituaries constructed from Statistics Canada vital statistics was simulated. A new re-identification risk is considered, it assumes that after gathering all the potential matches for a patient record (all records in the obituaries that are potential matches for an ADE record), an adversary tries to verify these potential matches. Two adversary scenarios were considered: (a) a mildly motivated adversary who will stop after one verification attempt, and (b) a highly motivated adversary who will attempt to verify all the potential matches and is only limited by practical or financial considerations. METHODS: The mean percentage of records in ADE that had a high probability of being re-identified was computed. RESULTS: Under scenario (a), the risk of re-identification from disclosing the province, age at death, gender, and exact date of the report is quite high, but the removal of province brings down the risk significantly. By only generalizing the date of reporting to month and year and including all other variables, the risk is always low. All ADE records have a high risk of re-identification under scenario (b), but the plausibility of that scenario is limited because of the financial and practical deterrent even for highly motivated adversaries. CONCLUSIONS: It is possible to disclose Canada’s adverse drug event database while ensuring that plausible re-identification risks are acceptably low. Our new re-identification risk model is suitable for such risk assessments. BioMed Central 2013-10-05 /pmc/articles/PMC4137558/ /pubmed/24094134 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6947-13-114 Text en Copyright © 2013 El Emam et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Article
El Emam, Khaled
Dankar, Fida K
Neisa, Angelica
Jonker, Elizabeth
Evaluating the risk of patient re-identification from adverse drug event reports
title Evaluating the risk of patient re-identification from adverse drug event reports
title_full Evaluating the risk of patient re-identification from adverse drug event reports
title_fullStr Evaluating the risk of patient re-identification from adverse drug event reports
title_full_unstemmed Evaluating the risk of patient re-identification from adverse drug event reports
title_short Evaluating the risk of patient re-identification from adverse drug event reports
title_sort evaluating the risk of patient re-identification from adverse drug event reports
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4137558/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24094134
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6947-13-114
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