Give anonymized medical data an extra privacy shield

Anonymizing health records will help but for the best use to be made of data bases, we need to go further

- RAHUL MATTHAN

When I first saw the original blueprint of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Health Mission (ABDM), the feature that really jumped out at me was its anonymizer module. This was the first time that a digital building block designed to de-identify personal data was being built directly into the digital workflow, and I was excited by the possibilities that this offered.

Once personal data is anonymized, it is inherently more secure. In the event of a data breach, all a hacker will be able to lay his hands on is raw data completely dissociated from the person to whom it pertains. This significantly reduces the risk that the data can be used to cause harm and improves the safety of the system as a whole.

Hospital systems rarely take the trouble to do something like this. Most of them store your personal information as plain text, allowing it to flow freely to all parts of the hospital—from the billing department and the pharmacy to diagnostic laboratories and just about any administrative function in the building—without paying heed to the fact that should there be a breach in any of those departments, it could be misused. What’s more, given that modern hospitals often outsource these functions, patient data is, more often than not, in the hands of entities over whom the hospital has little control.