How to Collect Consent for an Anonymous Medical Database

Emmanuel Benoist, Jan Sliwa

2014

Abstract

The goal of some medical databases is not to support the actual treatment of individual patients, but to provide the platform for medical research. Health data collected in such databases have to be anynomized - they should be analyzed only statistically and should not permit to retrieve the patient’s identity. Medical data collected for research should be anonymized to protect the patients’ privacy. In many countries it is mandatory. In many cases, not only one person treats a patient for a given illness. The documentation of a case requires the collaboration of different physicians that share information. This sharing of information requires the patient to authorise the access to the data stored by one physician by another one. We need therefore to implement a system for collecting the consent of an anonymous person. We present a novel solution to allow the practitioner to collect the consent of the patient in order to access the data recorded for that person. This solution is based on existing infrastructure, such as X509 certificates (present in e-ID or e-Health cards). Patients do not require to acquire any new hardware or to remember any new secret. We produce the fingerprint of the private key of the patient that can be used to re-identify the patient without having to know the identity of the patient (for instance the certificate) or even the patient’s public key.

References

  1. Camenisch, J. and Lysyanskaya, A. (2001). An efficient system for non-transferable anonymous credentials with optional anonymity revocation. In Advances in CryptologyEUROCRYPT 2001, pages 93- 118. Springer.
  2. Elger, B. S., Iavindrasana, J., Lo Iacono, L., Müller, H., Roduit, N., Summers, P., and Wright, J. (2010). Strategies for health data exchange for secondary, crossinstitutional clinical research. Computer methods and programs in biomedicine, 99(3):230-251.
  3. Ferguson, N., Schneier, B., and Kohno, T. (2010). Cryptography Engineering: Design Principles and Practical Applications. Wiley.
  4. Gliklich, R. E. and Dreyer, N. A., editors (2010). Registries for Evaluating Patient Outcomes: A User's Guide. Outcome Sciences, Inc., AHRQ Publication No.10- EHC049.
  5. Kwon, T. (2011). Privacy preservation with x. 509 standard certificates. Information Sciences, 181(13):2906- 2921.
  6. Wilson, S. (2005). A novel application of pki smartcards to anonymise health identifiers. In AusCERT Asia Pacific Information Technology Security Conference Refereed R&D Stream, page 64.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Benoist E. and Sliwa J. (2014). How to Collect Consent for an Anonymous Medical Database . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2014) ISBN 978-989-758-010-9, pages 405-412. DOI: 10.5220/0004902404050412


in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf14,
author={Emmanuel Benoist and Jan Sliwa},
title={How to Collect Consent for an Anonymous Medical Database},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2014)},
year={2014},
pages={405-412},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004902404050412},
isbn={978-989-758-010-9},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2014)
TI - How to Collect Consent for an Anonymous Medical Database
SN - 978-989-758-010-9
AU - Benoist E.
AU - Sliwa J.
PY - 2014
SP - 405
EP - 412
DO - 10.5220/0004902404050412