HHS wants contractor to test privacy of ‘anonymous’ data

Alice Lipowicz reports:

Can personal medical data that has been stripped of its identifiers to protect privacy later be used to identify a specific person? That is the question that the Health and Human Services Department is hoping a research contractor can answer.

HHS intends to hire a contractor to demonstrate either the “ability or inability” to re-identify data from a data set that has been de-identified under the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule, according to a Jan. 4 notice on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site.

Read more on FCW.

“anonymity” by kitakitts, Flickr, used under Creative Commons License