Anonymization of Electronic Medical Records to Support Clinical Analysis closely examines the privacy threats that may arise from medical data sharing, and surveys the state-of-the-art methods developed to safeguard data against these threats.

To motivate the need for computational methods, the book first explores the main challenges facing the privacy-protection of medical data using the existing policies, practices and regulations. Then, it takes an in-depth look at the popular computational privacy-preserving methods that have been developed for demographic, clinical and genomic data sharing, and closely analyzes the privacy principles behind these methods, as well as the optimization and algorithmic strategies that they employ. Finally, through a series of in-depth case studies that highlight data from the US Census as well as the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the book outlines a new, innovative class of privacy-preserving methods designed to ensure the integrity of transferred medical data for subsequent analysis, such as discovering or validating associations between clinical and genomic information.

Anonymization of Electronic Medical Records to Support Clinical Analysis is intended for professionals as a reference guide for safeguarding the privacy and data integrity of sensitive medical records. Academics and other research scientists will also find the book invaluable.

This handbook covers Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, which enable the storage, management, and sharing of massive amounts of demographic, diagnosis, medication, and genomic information. It presents privacy-preserving methods for medical data, ranging from laboratory test results to doctors' comments. The reuse of EMR data can greatly benefit medical science and practice, but must be performed in a privacy-preserving way according to data sharing policies and regulations. Written by world-renowned leaders in this field, each chapter offers a survey of a research direction or a solution to problems in established and emerging research areas. The authors explore scenarios and techniques for facilitating the anonymization of different types of medical data, as well as various data mining tasks. Other chapters present methods for emerging data privacy applications and medical text de-identification, including detailed surveys of deployed systems. A part of the book is devoted to legislative and policy issues, reporting on the US and EU privacy legislation and the cost of privacy breaches in the healthcare domain. This reference is intended for professionals, researchers and advanced-level students interested in safeguarding medical data.