Overview of Patient Data Anonymization

This chapter presents an overview of anonymization techniques that can be used to protect different types of patient data. We first discuss anonymization principles that can prevent identity and sensitive information disclosure in demographic data publishing, as well as algorithms for enforcing these principles, in Section.1. Subsequently, in Section 2.2, we turn our attention to diagnosis code anonymization, which, somewhat surprisingly, has not been considered by the medical informatics community. After motivating the need for anonymizing diagnosis codes, we present several related principles and transformation models that have been proposed by the data management community. We then review anonymization algorithms, detailing how these principles and algorithms are utilized by them. Last, in Section 2.3, we examine genomic data, which are also susceptible to privacy attacks.