Journal article
Ensuring a safe(r) harbor: excising personally identifiable information from structured electronic health record data
- Abstract:
- Recent findings have shown that the continued expansion of the scope and scale of data collected in electronic health records are making the protection of personally identifiable information (PII) more challenging and may inadvertently put our institutions and patients at risk if not addressed. As clinical terminologies expand to include new terms that may capture PII (e.g., Patient First Name, Patient Phone Number), institutions may start using them in clinical data capture (and in some cases, they already have). Once in use, PII-containing values associated with these terms may find their way into laboratory or observation data tables via extract-transform-load jobs intended to process structured data, putting institutions at risk of unintended disclosure. Here we aim to inform the informatics community of these findings, as well as put out a call to action for remediation by the community.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 293.3KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1017/cts.2021.880
Authors
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Journal:
- Journal of Clinical and Translational Science More from this journal
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 1
- Pages:
- 1-3
- Article number:
- e10
- Publication date:
- 2021-12-09
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-11-29
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2059-8661
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1242774
- Local pid:
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pubs:1242774
- Deposit date:
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2022-03-08
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Pfaff et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- ©2021 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Association for Clinical and Translational Science. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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