Privacy-aware health information sharing

Gaining access to high-quality health data is a vital requirement for informed decision making by medical practitioners and pharmaceutical researchers. Driven by mutual benefits and by regulations, there is a demand and necessity for healthcare institutes to share patient data with various parties for research purposes. However, health data in its raw form often contains sensitive information about individuals, and publishing such data will violate individual privacy. The current practice in information sharing primarily relies on policies and guidelines on the types of data that can be published, and agreements on the use of shared data. This approach alone may lead to excessive data distortion or insufficient protection. A problem of utmost im- portance, known as privacy-aware information sharing, is to provide methods and tools for sharing person-specific, sensitive information for the purpose of performing data mining.