Mathematical techniques for the protection of patient's privacy in medical databases

Abstract

In modern society, keeping the balance between privacy and public access to information is becoming a widespread problem more and more often. Valid data is crucial for many kinds of research, but the public good should not be achieved at the expense of individuals.

While creating a central database of patients, the CSIOZ wishes to provide statistical information for selected institutions. However, there are some plans to extend the access by providing the statistics to researchers or even to citizens. This might pose a significant risk of disclosure of some private, sensitive information about
individuals. This report proposes some methods to prevent data leaks.

One category of suggestions is based on the idea of modifying statistics, so that they would maintain importance for statisticians and at the same time guarantee the protection of patient's privacy.

Another group of proposed mechanisms, though sometimes difficult to implement, enables one to obtain precise statistics, while restricting such queries which might reveal sensitive information.