De-Identification of Clinical Trials Data Demystified

This paper discusses the de-identification and anonymization of clinical trials data. The reasons why you would want to deidentify and anonymize clinical trials data and the regulations that define the task will be discussed. Then a SAS based approach to clinical trials data de-identification will be presented. Finally, some de-identification challenges will be mentioned. The SAS code provided in this paper was developed with BASE SAS version 8.2 on UNIX, but the code should be compatible or portable to other operating systems and future releases of SAS.