Risks of sharing health care data are low

Greater availability of de-identified patient health data would enable better treatments and diagnostics, the researchers say. In recent years, scientists have made great strides in their ability to develop artificial intelligence algorithms that can analyze patient data and come up with new ways to diagnose disease or predict which treatments work best for different patients. The success of those algorithms depends on access to patient health data, which has been stripped of personal information that could be used to identify individuals from the dataset. However, the possibility that individuals could be identified through other means has raised concerns among privacy advocates. In a new study, a team of researchers led by MIT Principal Research Scientist Leo Anthony Celi has quantified the potential risk of this kind of patient re-identification and found that it is currently extremely low relative to the risk of data breach. In fact, between 2016 and 2021, the period examined in the study, there were no reports of patient re-identification through publicly available health data. The findings suggest that the potential risk to patient privacy is greatly outweighed by the gains for patients, who benefit from better diagnosis and treatment, says Celi.