Confidentiality and Privacy of Electronic Medical Records

NEW ORLEANS—Starting with a birth date, sex, and ZIP code, computer privacy expert Latanya Sweeney, PhD, retrieved health data of William Weld, former governor of Massachusetts, from an allegedly anonymous database of state employee health insurance claims. Knowing Weld lived in Cambridge, Mass, she cross-linked her data with that community’s publicly available voter registration records. Only six people shared Weld’s birth date. Only three were men. Of these, Weld was the only man in his five-digit ZIP code. Sensitive information can be obtained with standard office computer software, without resorting to hacking, said Sweeney, founder and director of the Laboratory for International Data Privacy at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Removing names and social security numbers doesn’t ensure privacy, she said. Birth date, sex, and ZIP code alone uniquely identify 87% of the US population. Sweeney and others explored confidentiality and medical record privacy in the 21st century in a forum at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) here in May. People who see psychiatrists must feel secure that their revelations will remain private, said outgoing APA president Daniel Borenstein, MD, session chair. “In the Internet age,” he said, “some wonder if privacy exists.” Borenstein, a private practitioner in Los Angeles, is clinical professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine. NEW PRIVACY REGULATIONS