Publishing data from electronic health records while preserving privacy: A survey of algorithms

The dissemination of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) can be highly beneficial for a range of medical studies, spanning from clinical trials to epidemic control studies, but it must be performed in a way that preserves patients' privacy. This is not straightforward, because the disseminated data need to be protected against several privacy threats, while remaining useful for subsequent analysis tasks. In this work, we present a survey of algorithms that have been proposed for publishing structured patient data, in a privacy-preserving way. We review more than 45 algorithms, derive insights on their operation, and highlight their advantages and disadvantages. We also provide a discussion of some promising directions for future research in this area.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Journal of Biomedical Informatics

• Publication date

  2014-08-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.jbi.2014.06.002PMID 24936746
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Privacy Preserving Data Mining

  2015cited by this paper
• Correction: A Systematic Review of Re-Identification Attacks on Health Data

  2015cited by this paper
• Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act

  2015cited by this paper
• Anonymizing Data with Relational and Transaction Attributes

  2013cited by this paper
• Security and privacy in electronic health records: A systematic literature review

  2013cited by this paper
• SHARE: system design and case studies for statistical health information release

  2013cited by this paper
• Permutation-Based Sequential Pattern Hiding

  2013cited by this paper
• Utility-Aware Anonymization of Diagnosis Codes

  2013influential reference
• Efficient and flexible anonymization of transaction data

  2013influential reference
• Recommendation-Based De-identification: A Practical Systems Approach towards De-identification of Unstructured Text in Healthcare

  2012cited by this paper
• Data Privacy: Definitions and Techniques

  2012cited by this paper
• Use and characteristics of electronic health record systems among office-based physician practices: United States, 2001-2012.

  2012cited by this paper
• Utility-preserving transaction data anonymization with low information loss

  2012influential reference
• Local and global recoding methods for anonymizing set-valued data

  2011influential reference
• A Systematic Review of Re-Identification Attacks on Health Data

  2011cited by this paper
• PCTA: privacy-constrained clustering-based transaction data anonymization

  2011cited by this paper
• Privacy Preserving GWAS Data Sharing

  2011cited by this paper
• Publishing set-valued data via differential privacy

  2011cited by this paper
• Preventing range disclosure in k-anonymised data

  2011cited by this paper
• The re-identification risk of Canadians from longitudinal demographics

  2011cited by this paper
• Revisiting sequential pattern hiding to enhance utility

  2011cited by this paper
• Differentially private data release for data mining

  2011cited by this paper
• Identifiability in biobanks: models, measures, and mitigation strategies

  2011cited by this paper
• Use of electronic medical records (EMR) for oncology outcomes research: assessing the comparability of EMR information to patient registry and health claims data

  2011cited by this paper
• Personal privacy vs population privacy: learning to attack anonymization

  2011cited by this paper
• Countering GATTACA: efficient and secure testing of fully-sequenced human genomes

  2011cited by this paper
• Closeness: A New Privacy Measure for Data Publishing

  2010cited by this paper
• Privacy-preserving data publishing: A survey of recent developments

  2010cited by this paper
• Database Technology for Life Sciences and Medicine

  2010cited by this paper
• An Integrative Framework for Anonymizing Clinical and Genomic Data

  2010cited by this paper
• Technical and Policy Approaches to Balancing Patient Privacy and Data Sharing in Clinical and Translational Research

  2010cited by this paper
• Anonymizing Transaction Data by Integrating Suppression and Generalization

  2010influential reference
• ρ-uncertainty

  2010influential reference
• The disclosure of diagnosis codes can breach research participants' privacy

  2010influential reference
• Beyond safe harbor: automatic discovery of health information de-identification policy alternatives

  2010cited by this paper
• δ-Presence without Complete World Knowledge

  2010cited by this paper
• Automatic de-identification of textual documents in the electronic health record: a review of recent research

  2010cited by this paper
• Anonymization of electronic medical records for validating genome-wide association studies

  2010influential reference
• Anonymizing Transaction Data to Eliminate Sensitive Inferences

  2010influential reference
• Longitudinal histories as predictors of future diagnoses of domestic abuse: modelling study

  2009cited by this paper
• Impact of spatial clustering on disease transmission and optimal control

  2009cited by this paper
• Hiding sensitive knowledge without side effects

  2009cited by this paper
• Anonymization of Set-Valued Data via Top-Down, Local Generalization

  2009influential reference
• COAT: COnstraint-based anonymization of transactions

  2009cited by this paper
• Privacy-preserving genomic computation through program specialization

  2009cited by this paper
• Review: Use of Electronic Medical Records for Health Outcomes Research

  2009cited by this paper
• Learning your identity and disease from research papers: information leaks in genome wide association study

  2009cited by this paper
• Towards Preference-Constrained k-Anonymisation

  2009cited by this paper
• Privacy-preserving data publishing for cluster analysis

  2009cited by this paper
• Computational Differential Privacy

  2009cited by this paper
• A globally optimal k-anonymity method for the de-identification of health data.

  2009influential reference
• Anonymizing transaction databases for publication

  2008influential reference
• My sister's keeper?: genomic research and the identifiability of siblings

  2008cited by this paper
• Efficient techniques for document sanitization

  2008cited by this paper
• k-Anonymization Revisited

  2008influential reference
• Privacy-preserving anonymization of set-valued data

  2008influential reference
• On Anti-Corruption Privacy Preserving Publication

  2008cited by this paper
• Privacy-MaxEnt: integrating background knowledge in privacy quantification

  2008cited by this paper
• Protecting privacy using k-anonymity.

  2008cited by this paper
• Resolving Individuals Contributing Trace Amounts of DNA to Highly Complex Mixtures Using High-Density SNP Genotyping Microarrays

  2008cited by this paper
• Handbook of Database Security - Applications and Trends

  2008cited by this paper
• An Efficient Clustering Algorithm for k-Anonymisation

  2008cited by this paper
• Injector: Mining Background Knowledge for Data Anonymization

  2008cited by this paper
• Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets

  2008cited by this paper
• Privacy-Preserving Data Mining: Models and Algorithms

  2008cited by this paper
• Differential Privacy: A Survey of Results

  2008cited by this paper
• Workload-aware anonymization techniques for large-scale datasets

  2008cited by this paper
• Efficient k -Anonymization Using Clustering Techniques

  2007cited by this paper
• On Multidimensional k-Anonymity with Local Recoding Generalization

  2007influential reference
• Aggregate Query Answering on Anonymized Tables

  2007cited by this paper
• Privacy Skyline: Privacy with Multidimensional Adversarial Knowledge

  2007cited by this paper
• Clustering-Based K-Anonymisation Algorithms

  2007cited by this paper
• Fast Data Anonymization with Low Information Loss

  2007influential reference
• Hiding the presence of individuals from shared databases

  2007influential reference
• K-Anonymization as Spatial Indexing: Toward Scalable and Incremental Anonymization

  2007cited by this paper
• Capturing data usefulness and privacy protection in K-anonymisation

  2007influential reference
• Flexible Anonymization For Privacy Preserving Data Publishing: A Systematic Search Based Approach

  2007cited by this paper
• Minimality Attack in Privacy Preserving Data Publishing

  2007cited by this paper
• The NCBI dbGaP database of genotypes and phenotypes

  2007cited by this paper
• t-Closeness: Privacy Beyond k-Anonymity and l-Diversity

  2007influential reference
• Workload-aware anonymization

  2006influential reference
• L-diversity: privacy beyond k-anonymity

  2006cited by this paper
• Efficient multivariate data-oriented microaggregation

  2006cited by this paper
• Personalized privacy preservation

  2006cited by this paper
• Anatomy: simple and effective privacy preservation

  2006influential reference
• Utility-based anonymization using local recoding

  2006influential reference
• Thoughts on k-Anonymization

  2006cited by this paper
• Mondrian Multidimensional K-Anonymity

  2006influential reference
• Differential Privacy

  2006cited by this paper
• Our Data, Ourselves: Privacy Via Distributed Noise Generation

  2006cited by this paper
• Achieving k-Anonymity by Clustering in Attribute Hierarchical Structures

  2006cited by this paper
• (α, k)-anonymity: an enhanced k-anonymity model for privacy preserving data publishing

  2006influential reference
• Protection : p-Sensitive k-Anonymity Property

  2006influential reference
• Top-down specialization for information and privacy preservation

  2005influential reference
• Approximation Algorithms for k-Anonymity

  2005cited by this paper
• Generalized multidimensional data mapping and query processing

  2005cited by this paper
• Ordinal, Continuous and Heterogeneous k-Anonymity Through Microaggregation

  2005cited by this paper
• Data privacy through optimal k-anonymization

  2005cited by this paper
• UK Biobank: from concept to reality.

  2005cited by this paper
• Incognito: efficient full-domain K-anonymity

  2005influential reference

• An Evaluation of Open Source Data Anonymisation Tools for Medical Data

  2025cites this paper
• Possibilities for secondary data use of electronic health records with WiseSpace de-identification

  2025cites this paper
• Personalized federated learning with hierarchical reweighting for multi-center clinical prediction

  2025cites this paper
• TCDiff: Triplex Cascaded Diffusion for High-fidelity Multimodal EHRs Generation with Incomplete Clinical Data

  2025cites this paper
• Privacy Risks and Protections in 2021 Texas State Abortion Data

  2025cites this paper
• GAFSOM: A Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning Algorithm for SOM Clustering

  2025cites this paper
• Anonify: Decentralized Dual-level Anonymity for Medical Data Donation

  2024cites this paper
• Data-Centric Foundation Models in Computational Healthcare: A Survey

  2024cites this paper
• Enabling privacy-preserving medication analysis in distributed EHR systems

  2024cites this paper
• Compromising anonymity in identity-reserved k-anonymous datasets through aggregate knowledge

  2024cites this paper
• Privacy-preserving datasets by capturing feature distributions with Conditional VAEs

  2024cites this paper
• Blockchain Based e-Healthcare Data Sharing Framework

  2024cites this paper
• Methods and tools for healthcare data anonymization: a literature review

  2023cites this paper
• PanDa Game: Optimized Privacy-Preserving Publishing of Individual-Level Pandemic Data Based on a Game Theoretic Model

  2023cites this paper
• Privacy in electronic health records: a systematic mapping study

  2023cites this paper
• A hybrid anonymization pipeline to improve the privacy-utility balance in sensitive datasets for ML purposes

  2023cites this paper
• DiffuseExpand: Expanding dataset for 2D medical image segmentation using diffusion models

  2023cites this paper
• Enhancing privacy for automatically detected quasi identifier using data anonymization

  2023cites this paper
• Impact of Anonymity Indicator "PFDOC Entropy l-Diversity" on Medical Data Utility

  2023cites this paper
• Personalized Federated Learning for In-Hospital Mortality Prediction of Multi-Center ICU

  2023cites this paper
• Enabling Health Data Sharing with Fine-Grained Privacy

  2023cites this paper
• Privacy Preservation Using Machine Learning in the Internet of Things

  2023cites this paper
• Health data security and privacy: Challenges and solutions for the future

  2022cites this paper
• Algorithms to anonymize structured medical and healthcare data: A systematic review

  2022cites this paper
• k-SALSA: k-Anonymous Synthetic Averaging of Retinal Images via Local Style Alignment

  2022cites this paper
• Compressed Gastric Image Generation Based on Soft-Label Dataset Distillation for Medical Data Sharing

  2022cites this paper
• Secure Cloud-based E-Health System using Advanced Encryption Standard

  2022cites this paper
• Measuring the impact of anonymization on real-world consolidated health datasets engineered for secondary research use: Experiments in the context of MODELHealth project

  2022cites this paper
• Measuring Discrepancies in Airbnb Guest Acceptance Rates Using Anonymized Demographic Data

  2022cites this paper
• Assessing the risk of re-identification arising from an attack on anonymised data

  2022cites this paper
• Privacy Preservation in Social Network Data using Evolutionary Model

  2022cites this paper
• Statistical anonymity: Quantifying reidentification risks without reidentifying users

  2022cites this paper
• ElGamal Homomorphic Encryption-Based Privacy Preserving Association Rule Mining on Horizontally Partitioned Healthcare Data

  2022cites this paper
• Privacy-preserving association rule mining based on electronic medical system

  2022cites this paper
• Privacy-Preserving Publishing of Individual-Level Pandemic Data Based on a Game Theoretic Model

  2022cites this paper
• Utility-Aware Data Anonymization Model for Healthcare Information

  2022cites this paper
• A General Framework Information Loss of Utility-Based Anonymization in Data Publishing

  2021cites this paper
• Anonymization Methods of Structured Health Care Data: A Literature Review

  2021cites this paper
• Dynamically adjusting case reporting policy to maximize privacy and public health utility in the face of a pandemic

  2021cites this paper
• Sensitive Label Privacy Preservation with Anatomization for Data Publishing

  2021cites this paper
• IAN: interpretable attention network for churn prediction in LBSNs

  2021cites this paper
• Dynamically Adjusting Case-Reporting Policy to Maximize Privacy and Utility in the Face of a Pandemic

  2021cites this paper
• Standard electronic health record (EHR) framework for Indian healthcare system

  2021cites this paper
• k-Anonymity in Practice: How Generalisation and Suppression Affect Machine Learning Classifiers

  2021cites this paper
• Pathways to Artificial General Intelligence: A Brief Overview of Developments and Ethical Issues via Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Data Science

  2021cites this paper
• An Extended Mondrian Algorithm – XMondrian to Protect Identity Disclosure

  2021influential citation
• Efficiently Supporting Online Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing in a Distributed Computing Environment

  2021cites this paper
• A Review of Anonymization for Healthcare Data

  2021cites this paper
• A Survey Of differential privacy-based techniques and their applicability to location-Based services

  2021cites this paper
• A system architecture for ensuring interoperability in a South African national electronic health record system

  2021cites this paper
• A clustering‐based anonymization approach for privacy‐preserving in the healthcare cloud

  2021cites this paper
• Privacy Preserving Association Rule Mining on Distributed Healthcare Data: COVID-19 and Breast Cancer Case Study

  2021cites this paper
• An empirically informed agent-based model of a Nepalese smallholder village

  2021cites this paper
• Anonymization Techniques for Privacy Preserving Data Publishing: A Comprehensive Survey

  2021cites this paper
• A survey on health care data using Machine learning Algorithms

  2020cites this paper
• A Syntactic Approach for Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning

  2020cites this paper
• A Survey on Privacy Properties for Data Publishing of Relational Data

  2020cites this paper
• Attribute susceptibility and entropy based data anonymization to improve users community privacy and utility in publishing data

  2020cites this paper
• PrivGen: Preserving Privacy of Sequences Through Data Generation

  2020cites this paper
• Anonymizing Data for Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning

  2020cites this paper
• Privacy Preservation of Electronic Health Record: Current Status and Future Direction

  2020cites this paper
• Evaluation of Privacy Risks of Patients’ Data in China: Case Study

  2020cites this paper
• Information hiding methods for E-Healthcare

  2020cites this paper
• Privacy‐Preserving Data Visualization: Reflections on the State of the Art and Research Opportunities

  2020influential citation
• Anonymizing Location Information in Unstructured Text Using Knowledge Graph

  2020cites this paper
• Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) for connected vehicles in smart cities

  2020cites this paper
• Remodeling: improved privacy preserving data mining (PPDM)

  2020cites this paper
• Disrupting Healthcare Silos: Addressing Data Volume, Velocity and Variety With a Cloud-Native Healthcare Data Ingestion Service

  2020cites this paper
• MNSSp3: Medical big data privacy protection platform based on Internet of things

  2020cites this paper
• Cybercrime and Private Health Data

  2020cites this paper
• Browsing Unicity: On the Limits of Anonymizing Web Tracking Data

  2020cites this paper
• Improving healthcare services using source anonymous scheme with privacy preserving distributed healthcare data collection and mining

  2020cites this paper
• Preserving Privacy in Image-based Emotion Recognition through User Anonymization

  2020cites this paper
• Privacy preservation in e-health cloud: taxonomy, privacy requirements, feasibility analysis, and opportunities

  2020cites this paper
• Sensitive Label Security Preservation with Anatomization for Data Publishing

  2020cites this paper
• A Novel Privacy Disclosure Risk Measure and Optimizing Privacy Preserving Data Publishing Techniques

  2019influential citation
• Efficient logging and querying for blockchain-based cross-site genomic dataset access audit

  2019cites this paper
• Privacy Preserving Distributed Association Rule Mining Approach on Vertically Partitioned Healthcare Data

  2019cites this paper
• Theoretical Model for Detecting Sensitive Data Items of Users in Data Publication

  2019cites this paper
• Adaptive k-Anonymity Approach for Privacy Preserving in Cloud

  2019cites this paper
• On the Case of Privacy in the IoT Ecosystem: A Survey

  2019cites this paper
• Privacy Preservation in Publishing Electronic Health Records Based on Perturbation

  2019cites this paper
• A Micro-Aggregation Algorithm Based on Density Partition Method for Anonymizing Biomedical Data

  2019cites this paper
• Use and Understanding of Anonymization and De-Identification in the Biomedical Literature: Scoping Review

  2019cites this paper
• Privacy-Preserving Sharing of Health Data using Hybrid Anonymisation Techniques-A Comparison

  2019cites this paper
• Towards Automatic Generation of Shareable Synthetic Clinical Notes Using Neural Language Models

  2019cites this paper
• K-ANONYMITY AS A PRIVACY MEASURE

  2019cites this paper
• Probabilistic record linkage of de-identified research datasets with discrepancies using diagnosis codes

  2019cites this paper
• Privacy-Aware Controllable Compressed Data Publishing Against Sparse Estimation Attack in IoT

  2019cites this paper
• A Survey of Healthcare Monitoring Systems for Chronically Ill Patients and Elderly

  2019cites this paper
• A review of Automatic end-to-end De-Identification: Is High Accuracy the Only Metric?

  2019cites this paper
• De-Health: All Your Online Health Information Are Belong to Us

  2019cites this paper
• PURE: A Privacy Aware Rule-Based Framework over Knowledge Graphs

  2019cites this paper
• Privacy preservation of data using crow search with adaptive awareness probability

  2019cites this paper
• Combatting The Challenges of Local Privacy for Distributional Semantics with Compression

  2019cites this paper
• A Systematic Review on Privacy Preserving Data Publishing Techniques

  2019cites this paper
• Improving Suppression to Reduce Disclosure Risk and Enhance Data Utility

  2019cites this paper
• Towards the Analysis of How Anonymization Affects Usefulness of Health Data in the Context of Machine Learning

  2019influential citation
• Federated and Differentially Private Learning for Electronic Health Records

  2019cites this paper
• Window Classifiers and Conditional Random Fields for Medical Report De-Identification

  2019cites this paper