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A Review of Privacy Preserving Mechanisms for Record Linkage

  • Chapter
Medical Data Privacy Handbook

Abstract

Record linkage represents the process of identifying records that refer to the same real-world entity across multiple sources. In the recent past, the large explosion of data from organizations and individuals has created critical challenges in record linkage process, leading the scientific community to develop a rich series of techniques. Among these recent developments, the design of record linkage solutions for medical data is a cornerstone for health-care systems, as personal identifying information, such as name and date of birth, is often used for linkage. In this setting, record linkage solutions are expected to preserve individual patients’ privacy in addition to be effective and efficient. In this chapter, we provide a broad review of the recent works in privacy preserving record linkage (PPRL). From a privacy-centric perspective, we summarize a comprehensive framework of the PPRL process and describe the privacy assurance techniques adopted for each step in the framework. With the applications in biomedical domain in mind, we identify several challenges for PPRL and discuss future research directions.

This work was done while the author “Liyue Fan” was at Emory University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Luca Bonomi & Li Xiong

  2. Information Laboratory (InfoLAB), University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Liyue Fan

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  1. Luca Bonomi
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  2. Liyue Fan
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  3. Li Xiong
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Correspondence to Luca Bonomi .

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  1. IBM Research - Ireland, Mulhuddart, Dublin, Ireland

    Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis

  2. Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom

    Grigorios Loukides

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Bonomi, L., Fan, L., Xiong, L. (2015). A Review of Privacy Preserving Mechanisms for Record Linkage. In: Gkoulalas-Divanis, A., Loukides, G. (eds) Medical Data Privacy Handbook. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23633-9_10

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