BACKGROUND
An ever growing for application of electronic health records (EHRs) has improved healthcare providers' communications, access to data for secondary use and promoted the quality of services. Patient's privacy has been changed to a great issue today since there are large loads of critical information in EHRs. Therefore, many privacy preservation techniques have been proposed and anonymization is a common one.
OBJECTIVES
This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of anonymization in preserving patients' privacy.
METHODS
The articles published in the 2005-2016 were included. Pubmed, Cochrane, IEEE and ScienceDirect were searched with a variety of related keywords. Finally, 18 articles were included.
RESULTS
In the present study, the relevant anonymization issues were investigated in four categories: secondary use of anonymized data, re-identification risk, anonymization effect on information extraction and inadequacy of current methods for different document types.
CONCLUSION
The results revealed that though anonymization cannot reduce the risk of re-identification to zero, if implemented correctly, can manage to help preserve patient's privacy.