ArticleTrials2020
Evaluating the re-identification risk of a clinical study report anonymized under EMA Policy 0070 and Health Canada Regulations.
Article in Trials, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- A distributed analysis approach for pharmacovigilance data from electronic medical records in German university hospitals: the POLAR_MI ETL Pipeline.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2026Article
- A Review on Integrating Breast Cancer Clinical Data: A Unified Platform Perspective.Current treatment options in oncology · 2025Review
- Utilization of anonymization techniques to create an external control arm for clinical trial data.BMC medical research methodology · 2023Observational
- Managing re-identification risks while providing access to the All of Us research program.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2023Article
- Secure Collaborative Platform for Health Care Research in an Open Environment: Perspective on Accountability in Access Control.Journal of medical Internet research · 2022Article
- Developing a Smart Home Technology Innovation for People With Physical and Mental Health Problems: Considerations and Recommendations.JMIR mHealth and uHealth · 2022Article
- Using game theory to thwart multistage privacy intrusions when sharing data.Science advances · 2021Article
- Article
- Optimizing the data available via Health Canada's clinical information portal.CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association journal = journal de l'Association medicale canadienne · 2021Article
- Sharing ICU Patient Data Responsibly Under the Society of Critical Care Medicine/European Society of Intensive Care Medicine Joint Data Science Collaboration: The Amsterdam University Medical Centers Database (AmsterdamUMCdb) Example.Critical care medicine · 2021Article
- Enabling realistic health data re-identification risk assessment through adversarial modeling.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2021Article
- Evaluating Identity Disclosure Risk in Fully Synthetic Health Data: Model Development and Validation.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundRegulatory agencies, such as the European Medicines Agency and Health Canada, are requiring the public sharing of clinical trial reports that are used to make drug approval decisions. Both agencies have provided guidance for the quantitative anonymization of these clinical reports before they are shared. There is limited empirical information on the effectiveness of this approach in protecting patient privacy for clinical trial data.
methodsIn this paper we empirically test the hypothesis that when these guidelines are implemented in practice, they provide adequate privacy protection to patients. An anonymized clinical study report for a trial on a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that is sold as a prescription eye drop was subjected to re-identification. The target was 500 patients in the USA. Only suspected matches to real identities were reported.
resultsSix suspected matches with low confidence scores were identified. Each suspected match took 24.2 h of effort. Social media and death records provided the most useful information for getting the suspected matches.
conclusionsThese results suggest that the anonymization guidance from these agencies can provide adequate privacy protection for patients, and the modes of attack can inform further refinements of the methodologies they recommend in their guidance for manufacturers.
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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.