ArticleJournal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA
A practical approach to achieve private medical record linkage in light of public resources.
Article in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Novel use of a hash-based tokenization for sharing sickle cell disease data without sharing protected health information.Blood advances · 2026Article
- Re-identification risk for common privacy preserving patient matching strategies when shared with de-identified demographics.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2026Article
- Accuracy of an Electronic Health Record Patient Linkage Module Evaluated between Neighboring Academic Health Care Centers.Applied clinical informatics · 2020Article
- Implementing a hash-based privacy-preserving record linkage tool in the OneFlorida clinical research network.JAMIA open · 2019Article
- Research Challenges at the Intersection of Big Data, Security and Privacy.Frontiers in big data · 2019Article
- Privacy-preserving record linkage in large databases using secure multiparty computation.BMC medical genomics · 2018Article
- Evaluating privacy-preserving record linkage using cryptographic long-term keys and multibit trees on large medical datasets.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2017Article
- Design and implementation of a privacy preserving electronic health record linkage tool in Chicago.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2015Article
- Privacy preserving probabilistic record linkage (P3RL): a novel method for linking existing health-related data and maintaining participant confidentiality.BMC medical research methodology · 2015Article
- Linked Records of Children with Traumatic Brain Injury. Probabilistic Linkage without Use of Protected Health Information.Methods of information in medicine · 2015Article
- Article
- Composite Bloom Filters for Secure Record Linkage.IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering · 2014Article
- Bigger data, collaborative tools and the future of predictive drug discovery.Journal of computer-aided molecular design · 2014Article
- SOEMPI: A Secure Open Enterprise Master Patient Index Software Toolkit for Private Record Linkage.AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium · 2014Article
- Privacy preserving interactive record linkage (PPIRL).Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIAReview
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveIntegration of patients' records across resources enhances analytics. To address privacy concerns, emerging strategies such as Bloom filter encodings (BFEs), enable integration while obscuring identifiers. However, recent investigations demonstrate BFEs are, in theory, vulnerable to cryptanalysis when encoded identifiers are randomly selected from a public resource. This study investigates the extent to which cryptanalysis conditions hold for (1) real patient records and (2) a countermeasure that obscures the frequencies of the identifying values in encoded datasets.
designFirst, to investigate the strength of cryptanalysis for real patient records, we build BFEs from identifiers in an electronic medical record system and apply cryptanalysis using identifiers in a publicly available voter registry. Second, to investigate the countermeasure under ideal cryptanalysis conditions, we compose BFEs from the identifiers that are randomly selected from a public voter registry. MEASUREMENT: We utilize precision (ie, rate of correct re-identified encodings) and computation efficiency (ie, time to complete cryptanalysis) to assess the performance of cryptanalysis in BFEs before and after application of the countermeasure.
resultsCryptanalysis can achieve high precision when the encoded identifiers are composed of a random sample of a public resource (ie, a voter registry). However, we also find that the attack is less efficient and may not be practical for more realistic scenarios. By contrast, the proposed countermeasure made cryptanalysis impractical in terms of precision and efficiency.
conclusionsPerformance of cryptanalysis against BFEs based on patient data is significantly lower than theoretical estimates. The proposed countermeasure makes BFEs resistant to known practical attacks.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.