Upgrades to Unique Re-identification Risk Assessment and De-identification Software

Aug. 22, 2011 - PRLog -- Ottawa. More effective methods are required to handle the increasing complexity of geospatial and longitudinal information and Privacy Analytics Inc. has responded by releasing a product upgrade to its unique risk-assessment and de-identification tool.

“Real data today is complex and this new version allows for the optimal de-identification of this data, providing access to valuable data that would otherwise have been inaccessible or released with a high risk for re-identification,” says Dr. Khaled El Emam, CEO of Privacy Analytics Inc., following the release of the latest version of the Privacy Analytics Risk Assessment Tool (PARAT) and de-identification software to secondary users of personal health data in Canada and the United States.

Using peer-reviewed metrics and de-identification algorithms, PARAT will allow an increasing number of secondary users to protect and share multiple data sets in support of cross-sectional, longitudinal, and geospatial analysis.

The only commercially available product of its kind, PARAT allows users to “tweak” their data sets to arrive at the optimum privacy and data access levels. For geospatial data, many organizations rely on cropping a digit or two from a postal code or ZIP code to de-identify it before making data available for secondary purposes, such as research, public health, and marketing. But “cropping” can diminish the quality of data by suppressing valuable location information that is vital to any kind of geospatial analysis, as is the case in many public health applications.

The upgrades in this release are:
1.   Improved risk assessment and de-identification functionalities for longitudinal data to meet the high standards already established for cross-sectional analysis.
2.   A new postal code aggregation technique permitting postal codes to be generalized into small groupings
3.   A more sophisticated tool to create generalization hierarchies for nominal variables
4.   Maintaining the same field type for generalized data sets
5.   The ability to import and export data from a Microsoft SQL server or Oracle server databases

Privacy Analytics Inc. was founded in 2007 by Dr. El Emam to commercialize his leading edge work on privacy risk assessment and de-identification technologies. Custodians of personal health information, including hospitals, medical registries and public health programs in Canada and the US, use the patent-pending technology to maximize the utility of data while defending against re-identification attacks and avoid costly breaches.

Dr. El Emam also leads the multi-disciplinary team of the Electronic Health Information Laboratory (EHIL), a multi-disciplinary team composed of computer scientists, software engineers, mathematicians, statisticians and privacy experts. The lab’s work is internationally recognized for conducting research on risk assessment methods for handling health data. The lab also developed the free, online REB and IRB Wizards for the oversight bodies entrusted with reviewing investigative proposals and tracking medical research projects to ensure compliance with best ethical practices.

For further information and to interview Dr. El Emam, please contact Jay Innes, jinnes@privacyanalytics.ca, 613.293.9833

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The Privacy Analytics software enables the disclosure of sensitive personal health data without compromising individual privacy. The PARAT tool is the only commercially available de-identification tool on the market.