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3 March 2010
A study just published examines the leaks of PHI from peer-to-peer file sharing program users in the US and Canada, and compares that to leaks of financial information. The article also examines the ethical issues in collecting personal information from the Internet without consent, and what the considerations should be.
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1 March 2010
This one day event on April 6th in Ottawa examines issues around the need and mechanisms for the integration of patient information into a single record, and how to take account of patients' needs while doing so. It is a unique opportunity to understand the patients' perspectives in the efforts to deploy EMRs and EHRs.
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12 February 2010
A new article in Healthcare Information Management and Communications describes the privacy risks to patients from inadvertant and deliberate disclosure of health information. Because the frequency and magnitude of these disclosures is expected to increase, the articles calls for more meaningful patient engagement in developing rules on the collection, use, and dislcosure of health information and the incorporation of the principles of Privacy by Design in the development of new systems.
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11 January 2010
In conjunction with the Canadian AI Conference, we are organizing a workshop focusing on the theory, development, and application of intelligent methods for protecting the privacy of personal information when disclosed for secondary purposes. This will be held on May 30th 2010 in Ottawa.
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4 December 2009
The presentation slides from the 2009 Electronic Health Information and Privacy conference are now available. This year's theme was the privacy of genetic information, with additional coverage of public health issues.
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15 October 2009
A new knowledgebase capturing our experiences with re-identification risk assessment and de-identification has been launched. This also includes responses to some of the common questions that we get asked as we transition our research into practice.
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24 September 2009
A recent community statement on the prepublication release of biological data has just come out. It sets out some practice recommendations to facilitate making more data available for the sceintific community.
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16 August 2009
We have just posted a new technical report providing an overview of the different de-identification techniques for health information. The report also provides guidance on when to use each technique.
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14 August 2009
We have two positions for C# programmers in our group. The first is a full-time position for an experienced programmer and is suitable for a recent graduate with one or two years of work experience. The second is a temporary position (3 months) for a C# programmer to develop applications on Sharepoint, and is suitable for a student. Both will be based at the CHEO Research Institute and start immediately.
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3 August 2009
A new paper has just been published by our lab which provides a case study of re-identification risk assessment for disclosing hospital pharmacy data. The data was being disclosed to a commercial research firm.
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4 July 2009
We have just released a new dashboard tool which allows interactive analysis of data breach data. The tool allows the viewing of breach trends and distributions over user-defined time intervals.
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7 April 2009
A new study provides an estimate of the adoption of electronic data capture tools in Canadian clinical trials. This also looks at factors that predict adoption, such as trial size, type of sponsor, and whether the trial was with pediatric or adult subjects.
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13 February 2009
We are organizing a half day seminar at the 2009 Canadian IAPP Conference in Toronto on 29th April. This will cover the options for disclosing health data for secondary purposes, and describe a risk assessment framework for de-identification with case studies.
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6 February 2009
We have just published an article reviewing the legal status of the disclosure of prescription records by pharmacies to commercial research companies and to data aggregators. This part focuses on prescriber privacy and how that has been dealt with in the US and Canada.
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15 December 2008
A new tool has just been released by our lab that provides recommendations on geographic area size and re-identification risk (uniqueness). This expert system addresses a long standing problem in the privacy community about which areas to release data on.
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14 December 2008
A recent article from our lab presents models that can be used to reason about geographic area size and re-identification risk. This provides an empirical basis for deciding whether an area is too small or not.
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7 December 2008
Our de-identification technology is being showcased at the Privacy by Design Challenge, organized by the Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, on 28th January 2009 in Toronto. We will demonstrate the latest tools and case studies in de-identifying health data for secondary uses.
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5 December 2008
A recent recording of a presentation on de-identifying clinical data for research purposes is now available on-line. This was intended to explain re-identification risks and how to manage them to researchers. (1 hour)
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21 November 2008
The handouts from the 2008 Electronic Health Information and Privacy conference are now available on-line. This includes all the slides from the presentations. NOTE: large file.
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24 October 2008
Capturing our experiences with de-identification over the last four years, this report presents a pragmatic risk management framework that allows secondary use while addressing privacy concerns. The framework has been applied on actual projects and in our lab's tools.
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22 October 2008
A lecture by Khaled El Emam is now on-line. This lecture provides an overview of how to manage re-identification risk and the types of risks that are important to manage.
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13 October 2008
Our lab has recently been involved in an evaluation of re-identification risk of pharmacy data at CHEO. We made recommendations and provided technology for de-identfying the prescription data so that it can be shared with an external research company for drug utilization benchmarking purposes.
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30 September 2008
A recent study published by our lab examines the failure rate of IT projects based on two international surveys in 2005 and 2007. Overall, approximately one third of IT projects are cancelled or deliver but are consider failures. This was consistent across the two years.
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14 September 2008
Our lab recently published an article describing a new technique for protecting against journalist re-identification risk. The publication includes an empirical comparison with other techniques. The results provide a solution for a large general class of risks.
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10 September 2008
Our lab recently published an article providing an overview of commonly used heuristics for de-identifying health data, and argues that these have critical limitations. A more explicit risk based approach is needed.
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28 August 2008
A new tool that performs re-identification risk assessment and automated de-identification based on our research work is now available. It is being applied to manage re-identification risk for secondary use scenarios.
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10 June 2008
Fida Dankar, a post-doctoral fellow at the Electronic Health Information Laboratory will be presenting a modified k-Anonymity procedure in a talk entitled "Protecting Privacy Using k-Anonymity" on June 18, 2008 at 4:00 p.m. at the University of Ottawa, room CBY-A707.
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19 February 2008
The fourth annual Electronic Health Information and Privacy conference will be held on 3rd November 2008 at the Hampton Inn Conference Center, Ottawa. This year's main themes will be the privacy of geographic/location information, and genetic data privacy.
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14 December 2007
The full set of presentations from the Electronic Health Information and Privacy Conference held in Ottawa on 3 December is now available. The conference covered a wide spectrum of policy, technical, and ethical issues related to the collection, use, and disclosure of clinical and genetic information, including EHR governance issues, medical ID theft, and public attitudes and behaviors towards privacy.
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5 November 2007
The full set of presentations from the Consumer Health Informatics Summit held in Ottawa on 30th October is now available. The summit considered how Information Technology available today can empower patients to manage their own health as well as barriers and facilitators to its adoption in Canada.
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4 October 2007
A paper just published by our lab presents the results of a study on the extent to which personal health information is leaking through second hand computer disk drives. Approximately 10% of used drives have sensitive health information on the drive owners and others (eg, patients and clients).
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7 May 2007
A paper just published by our lab presents the results from a survey of the quality assurance practices of biomedical open source software projects. The findings cover the implementation of peer reviews and testing.
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4 May 2007
The final report for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada on re-identification risks in Canada and how to minimize these risks has now been released. This documents a series of studies conducted by our lab over the last 12 months as part of that project.
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21 April 2007
A new case study illustrating how to use the PrivacyAnalytics v2 tool to perform basic anonymization of identifying variables on a large database has just been released.
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13 April 2007
The newest version of the data anonymization tool, PrivacyAnalytics, has just been released. The new version includes improved randomization and automation functions, as well as extending data handling capabilities. Requires a password to install.
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16 March 2007
The third annual Electronic Health Information and Privacy Conference has been announced. It will be held in Ottawa on 3rd December 2007 at the NAC.
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20 December 2006
The full report from the privacy guidelines workshop is now publicly available. This workshop gathered experts from across the country to discuss three contemporary issues: health research, re-identiication, and outsourcing.
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7 December 2006
The lab's privacy blog, which has been around for more than a year, is now integrated with the EHIL web site. The blog provides regular updates on health care privacy stories and events, as well as discussions related to our privacy work.
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21 November 2006
A paper reporting on the lab's work on re-identification risk in Canada has just been published in JMIR.
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21 November 2006
The complete set of presentations from the Second Annual Electronic Health Information and Privacy Conference held in Ottawa on 13th November are now available.
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