Resources for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

A Sensible Censor For Sharing Medical Records - MIT-Developed Software Helps Protect Patient Privacy

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Newly developed MIT software will help to allay patients' fears about who has access to their confidential records, facilitating the use of that data for medical research. In the July 24 issue of the journal BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, a team of MIT researchers describes a computer program capable of automatically deleting details from medical records that may identify patients, while leaving important medical information intact.

Patient records that are to be shared within the research community must have any identifying information removed, according to the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). However, manual removal of identifying information is prohibitively expensive, time consuming and prone to error - constraints that have prompted considerable research toward developing automated techniques for "de-identifying" medical records.

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