Protecting Patient Privacy Using Anonymization Techniques
Anonymization, Healthcare Data, Privacy
Processing and sharing of health data has become a vital part of modern health systems, enabling improvements in patient care to support relevant scientific research. Despite these benefits, improper sharing and uncontrolled use of this information may directly affect the privacy of the patients involved. Thus, sensitive health data processing and sharing systems must meet high standards of security and privacy, including mechanisms to ensure that all ethical and legal requirements are met. Anonymization is one of these mechanisms and allows to ensure that it is not possible to directly identify the patient from a specific data. In this context, the objective of this paper is the development of an anonymization architecture that will preserve patients' privacy in a healthcare environment, considering sensitive health data that will be accessed by different parties and stored in different distributed databases. The solution should ensure anonymity of medical records, but allow patient-related information, even if stored in an anonymous and distributed manner, to be efficiently gathered in a single electronic patient record with the patient's identity whenever necessary. and duly authorized. As a case study, the proposed solution will be applied in the context of the SigSaúde platform, currently under development at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN).