Research Ethics Board Wizard - Re-identification risk assessment without data

Research Ethics Boards (REBs) often have to make decisions about re-identification risk before any data is collected. For many REBs the majority of their protocols are not "secondary use" protocols whereby a database exists and the investigator wishes to analyze that data. Rather, many are prospective studies where new data will be collected. Traditional re-identification risk assessment tools and de-identification tools could not handle that situation because they required the data to already exist - until now.

The REB Wizard tool that is illustrated in this video provides REBs the capability to assess re-identification risk by just describing the fields that will be collected and which part of the country (REB Wizard only exists for Canada at this point) the data will be collected from. Based on extensive analysis of the Canadian census, we have constructed models that would then provide an estimate of the percentage of the population that is at high risk of re-identification. In this case re-identification risk is measured in terms of uniqueness.

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