Keeping Medical Data Private

People have always been concerned about the quite common, practice of storing thier medical information on computers into "private databases". "The problem is, stuff that's considered anonymous really isn't," says Michael Swiernik, director of medical informatics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Patients are wary of whether or not they are truly protected and with the development of a new algorithm, we may be on the way to better ensuring that medical data can be securely stored on computers. Researchers at Vanderbilt University have created an algorithm designed to protect the privacy of patients while maintaining researchers' ability to analyze vast amounts of genetic and clinical data to find links between diseases and specific genes or to understand why patients can respond so differently to treatments. The increasing availability of electronic medical records makes it easier to group patient files into huge databases where they can be accessed by researchers trying to find associations between genes and medical conditions--an important step on the road to personalized medicine. Though the patient records in the databases are "anonymous", they still have a numerical code called the the ICD, which can easily be tracked by a hacker. Bradley Malin and his colleagues found that they could identify more than 96 percent of a group of patients based solely on their particular sets of diagnosis codes.Researchers want to combine their clinical-code-protecting algorithm with other security mechanisms already in place, like protections for demographic information, to keep patient data as safe as possible. They also want to reach out to use more data outside of Vanderbilt, according to Grigorios Loukides, the study's lead author. "Generating data is expensive, and it's both good science and good etiquette to reuse data. The challenge is to do it while protecting people." says study author Malin.