Data Anonymization for Pervasive Health Care: Systematic Literature Mapping Study
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Data science offers an unparalleled opportunity to identify new insights into many aspects of human life with recent advances in health care. Using data science in digital health raises significant challenges regarding data privacy, transparency, and trustworthiness. Recent regulations enforce the need for a clear legal basis for collecting, processing, and sharing data, for example, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (2016) and the United Kingdom's Data Protection Act (2018). For health care providers, legal use of the electronic health record (EHR) is permitted only in clinical care cases. Any other use of the data requires thoughtful considerations of the legal context and direct patient consent. Identifiable personal and sensitive information must be sufficiently anonymized. Raw data are commonly anonymized to be used for research purposes, with risk assessment for reidentification and utility. Although health care organizations have internal policies defined for information governance, there is a significant lack of practical tools and intuitive guidance about the use of data for research and modeling. Off-the-shelf data anonymization tools are developed frequently, but privacy-related functionalities are often incomparable with regard to use in different problem domains. In addition, tools to support measuring the risk of the anonymized data with regard to reidentification against the usefulness of the data exist, but there are question marks over their efficacy. OBJECTIVE: In this systematic literature mapping study, we aim to alleviate the aforementioned issues by reviewing the landscape of data anonymization for digital health care. METHODS: We used Google Scholar, Web of Science, Elsevier Scopus, and PubMed to retrieve academic studies published in English up to June 2020. Noteworthy gray literature was also used to initialize the search. We focused on review questions covering 5 bottom-up aspects: basic anonymization operations, privacy models, reidentification risk and usability metrics, off-the-shelf anonymization tools, and the lawful basis for EHR data anonymization. RESULTS: We identified 239 eligible studies, of which 60 were chosen for general background information; 16 were selected for 7 basic anonymization operations; 104 covered 72 conventional and machine learning-based privacy models; four and 19 papers included seven and 15 metrics, respectively, for measuring the reidentification risk and degree of usability; and 36 explored 20 data anonymization software tools. In addition, we also evaluated the practical feasibility of performing anonymization on EHR data with reference to their usability in medical decision-making. Furthermore, we summarized the lawful basis for delivering guidance on practical EHR data anonymization. CONCLUSIONS: This systematic literature mapping study indicates that anonymization of EHR data is theoretically achievable; yet, it requires more research efforts in practical implementations to balance privacy preservation and usability to ensure more reliable health care applications.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.059 | 0.111 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it