Grant: Operating Grant - Priority Announcement: Ethics

Increasingly, vast amounts of personal health information is being collected in electronic medical records. This information can be very beneficial for many other purposes in addition to providing care, for example, research and public health. Researchers can investigate, say, the impact of drugs, and public health professionals can detect disease outbreaks early. A big impediment to using this data for these secondary purposes has been concerns about privacy. In this project we will develop methods and tools to anonymize this data and to perform analysis on the data in a privacy preserving way. These results will allow the data to be used for research and public health and at the same time protect the privacy of Canadians. The challenge in this research is to achieve the anonymization and privacy preserving computation objectives and still maintain high quality datasets at the end (e.g., anonymization often distorts the data, so there is a tradeoff between anonymization and data quality).