ArticleJournal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA2015
Design and implementation of a privacy preserving electronic health record linkage tool in Chicago.
Article in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT01446705 (Evaluation of VLER_Indiana Health Information Exchange Demonstration Project), which is not on this map. Cited by 78 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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.
Evaluation of VLER_Indiana Health Information Exchange Demonstration Project
Who cites it
78 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Association of Thyroid Function Genetic Predictors With Atrial Fibrillation: A Phenome-Wide Association Study and Inverse-Variance Weighted Average Meta-analysis.JAMA cardiology · 2019Pooled it
- Deploying the REACHnet Multi-State EHR-Based Network for Disease Surveillance (MENDS) node: lessons learned and tools utilized.JAMIA open · 2026Article
- Novel use of a hash-based tokenization for sharing sickle cell disease data without sharing protected health information.Blood advances · 2026Article
- Accuracy of an XGBoost-based privacy preserving record linkage system compared with an electronic health record patient matching module in identifying patients shared between nearby academic health centers.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2026Article
- A novel analysis methodology for assessment of re-identification risks for the National Cancer Institute cancer registry privacy preserving record linkage technique.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 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
- Investigation into EHR data coverage in the All of Us Research Program via linkage to health insurance claims.PloS one · 2026Article
- Linking patient records at scale with a hybrid approach combining contrastive learning and deterministic rules.Biology methods & protocols · 2026Article
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- The Advanced Confidentiality Engine as a Scalable Tool for the Pseudonymization of Biomedical Data in Translational Settings: Development and Usability Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- Article
- High Hospitalization Rates and Risk Factors Among Frail Patients With Cirrhosis: A 10-year Population-based Cohort Study.Clinical gastroenterology and hepatology : the official clinical practice journal of the American Gastroenterological Association · 2025Article
- Data linkage multiplies research insights across diverse healthcare sectors.Communications medicine · 2025Review
- Accuracy of privacy preserving record linkage for real world data in the United States: a systemic review.JAMIA open · 2025Review
- Privacy preserving record linkage for public health action: opportunities and challenges.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2024Article
- Clinical Research Informatics: a Decade-in-Review.Yearbook of medical informatics · 2024Review
- Article
- Privacy-preserving record linkage across disparate institutions and datasets to enable a learning health system: The national COVID cohort collaborative (N3C) experience.Learning health systems · 2024Article
- Linking Patient Encounters across Primary and Ancillary Electronic Health Record Systems: A Comparison of Two Approaches.ACI open · 2024Article
- A broadly applicable approach to enrich electronic-health-record cohorts by identifying patients with complete data: a multisite evaluation.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2023Article
18 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
17 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveTo design and implement a tool that creates a secure, privacy preserving linkage of electronic health record (EHR) data across multiple sites in a large metropolitan area in the United States (Chicago, IL), for use in clinical research.
methodsThe authors developed and distributed a software application that performs standardized data cleaning, preprocessing, and hashing of patient identifiers to remove all protected health information. The application creates seeded hash code combinations of patient identifiers using a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliant SHA-512 algorithm that minimizes re-identification risk. The authors subsequently linked individual records using a central honest broker with an algorithm that assigns weights to hash combinations in order to generate high specificity matches.
resultsThe software application successfully linked and de-duplicated 7 million records across 6 institutions, resulting in a cohort of 5 million unique records. Using a manually reconciled set of 11 292 patients as a gold standard, the software achieved a sensitivity of 96% and a specificity of 100%, with a majority of the missed matches accounted for by patients with both a missing social security number and last name change. Using 3 disease examples, it is demonstrated that the software can reduce duplication of patient records across sites by as much as 28%.
conclusionsSoftware that standardizes the assignment of a unique seeded hash identifier merged through an agreed upon third-party honest broker can enable large-scale secure linkage of EHR data for epidemiologic and public health research. The software algorithm can improve future epidemiologic research by providing more comprehensive data given that patients may make use of multiple healthcare systems.
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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.