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Confidentiality and Privacy of Electronic Medical Records
Psychiatrists Explore Risks of the "Information Age"
Lynne Lamberg
JAMA. 2001;285:3075-3076.
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New Orleans—Starting with a birth date, sex, and ZIP code, computer privacy expert Latanya Sweeney, PhD, retrieved health data of William Weld, former governor of Massachusetts, from an allegedly anonymous database of state employee health insurance claims. Knowing Weld lived in Cambridge, Mass, she cross-linked her data with that community's publicly available voter registration records. Only six people shared Weld's birth date. Only three were men. Of these, Weld was the only man in his five-digit ZIP code.
Sensitive information can be obtained with standard office computer software, without resorting to hacking, said Sweeney, founder and director of the Laboratory for International Data Privacy at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Removing names and social security numbers doesn't ensure privacy, she said. Birth date, sex, and ZIP code alone uniquely identify 87% of the US population.
Sweeney and others explored confidentiality and medical record privacy in the 21st century . . . [Full Text of this Article]
THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES
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Confessions of an Electronic Medical Record User
Tracy
Obstet Gynecol 2008;111:1435-1438.
FULL TEXT
Confidentiality in the Age of HIPAA: A Challenge for Psychosomatic Medicine
Mermelstein and Wallack
Psychosomatics 2008;49:97-103.
ABSTRACT
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