Secure Health Data Linkage and Geocoding: Current Approaches and Research Directions
Peter Christen, Tim Churches · ANU Open Research (Australian National University) · 2006
Data linkage is the task of matching and aggregating records that relate to the same entity from one or more data sets.A related technique is geocoding, the matching of addresses to their geographic locations.In the health sector, data linkage is commonly used to assemble longitudinal or epidemiological data sets that would otherwise not be available, and geocoding is employed for spatial analysis of health data.As data linkage is often based on personal information (like names, addresses, and dates of birth), privacy and confidentiality issues are of paramount importance.In this paper we present an overview of current approaches to secure data linkage and geocoding and discuss their limitations, and using several real-world scenarios we illustrate the significance of developing improved techniques for large scale and distributed secure linking and geocoding.We discuss four core areas of research that need to be addressed in order to make linking and geocoding of large confidential data collections possible: secure matching techniques, automated record pair classification, scalability, and techniques that prevent re-identification of records over collections of linked data.Finally, we give a short overview of several Australian projects in this area.