Mobile Anonymization and Pseudonymization of Structured Health Data for Research

Healthcare Organizations need to share the health data of the patients with Research Centers in order to fulfill research purposes and improve the healthcare services provided to the patients. However, the information being processed by the Research Centers includes personal and/or sensitive data, which puts the privacy of the individuals at stake. To mitigate the risk of identity disclosure and privacy violation, a variety of privacy mechanisms, such as anonymization and pseudonymization, can be applied to the personal data of the data subjects. In this paper a mobile library is presented in order to either anonymize or pseudonymize the individuals’ personal information which follows the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources protocol. To evaluate the implementation and the functionalities of the library two case studies are described – one for each privacy mechanism.