PIPE - Pseudonymization of Information for Privacy in e-Health

The discussion of privacy is one of the fundamental issues in health care today and a trade-off between the patients' requirement for privacy as well as the society's needs for improving efficiency and reducing costs of the health care system. Today, highly sensitive data is managed in medical systems that are however hardly protected. As a result of the high sensitivity of medical data and due to an endless list of security breaches revealing patients' data, there is an increasing social and political pressure to prevent the misuse of health data. Project PIPE (Pseudonymization of Information for Privacy in e-Health) aims at developing techniques that make it technically impossible to violate the privacy of health care consumers. The objective of the project is to develop a secure, configurable pseudonymization service that can be employed for and customized to different e-health applications. Its main idea is to disassociate personal identification data from electronic health records and to control access to sensitive identification data via a layered encryption model. By pseudonymizing electronic health records, PIPE provides secondary use of medical data without revealing the patients' identity.