De-identifying personal health data

This chapter discusses examples of how data de-identification is applied in practice among custodians of national health datasets in the OECD. The chapter notes gaps between the goals of legislative requirements for data protection and decision making about data de-identification methods in practice. It describes country reports of de-identifying national datasets prior to analysis and describes the use of pseudonymisation to replace direct patient identifiers in national datasets. It discusses how countries apply other data de-identification techniques to address the risk of data becoming re-identified and reviews the importance of weighing data de-identification techniques against the utility of the dataset for its intended purpose.