Privacy in context : the costs and benefits of a new deidentification method

The American public continues to be concerned about medical privacy. Policy research continues to show people's demand for health organizations to protect patient-specific data. Health organizations need personally identifiable data for unhampered decision making; however, identifiable data are often the basis of information abuse if such data are improperly disclosed. This thesis shows that health organizations may use deidentified data for key routine organizational operations. I construct a technology adoption model and investigate if a for-profit health insurer could use deidentified data for key internal software quality management applications. If privacy-related data are analyzed without rigor, little support is found to incorporate more privacy protections into such applications. Legal and financial motivations appear lacking. Adding privacy safeguards to such software programs apparently doesn't improve policy-holder care quality. Existing technical approaches do not readily allow for data deidentification while permitting key computations within the applications. A closer analysis of data reaches different conclusions. I describe the bills that are currently passing through Congress to mitigate abuses of identifiable data that exist within organizations.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Trepetin, Stanley

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Peter Szolovits.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37975

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37975