Awareness Survey of Anonymisation of Protected Health Information in Pakistan

With the growing advancement of science and technology, research has become the vital step in every educational field. This research survey sheds light on the methods of de-identification and anonymisation for protecting the privacy of the patients, practitioners and nurses. Researchers require huge amounts of patient data for carrying out different analyses. Patient information must therefore be preserved while ensuring that the applied privacy policies do not render the data less valuable. De-identification and anonymisation techniques masks the patient identity through various methods such as suppression, randomisation, shuffling, creating pseudonyms, generalisation, adding noise, scrambling, masking, encoding and encryption, etc. The dataset having critical information is called protected health information (PHI) through which an individual can be identified. Thus, PHI must be preserved through an appropriate means to make data valuable and at the same time, protect the data from hackers. This paper presents the importance of securing PHIs in Pakistan by analysing the results of an awareness survey.

@article{Shahid2017,
  title     = {Awareness Survey of Anonymisation of Protected Health Information in Pakistan},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {8},
  number    = {5},
  year      = {2017},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Muhammad Usman Shahid and Saman Hina and Waqas Mahmood and Hamda Usman},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2017.080545},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2017.080545}
}