Pre-Grant Publication Number: 20080077604
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Prior Art Detail
Summary / Description
| Summary / Description | The Federal law requiring the privacy of patients to be protected. |
Basic Information
| Type of Prior Art | Print Publication |
| Publication Title * | Medical Privacy - National Standards to Protect the Privacy of Personal Health Information |
| Author | US Government |
| ISBN | |
| Page Range | |
| Medium | Book excerpt |
| Publication Date * | August 14, 2002 |
| URL | http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/fi... |
Notes / To Do
| Notes | |
Excerpt
Excerpt Covered entities may choose to use the Privacy Rule’s safe harbor method for de-identification. Under the safe harbor method, covered entities must remove all of a list of 18 enumerated identifiers and have no actual knowledge that the information remaining could be used, alone or in combination, to identify a subject of the information. The identifiers that must be removed include direct identifiers, such as name, street address, social security number, as well as other identifiers, such as birth date, admission and discharge dates, and five-digit zip code. The safe harbor requires removal of geographic subdivisions smaller than a State, except for the initial three digits
of a zip code if the geographic unit formed by combining all zip codes with
the same initial three digits contains more than 20,000 people. In addition,
age, if less than 90, gender, ethnicity, and other demographic information not
listed may remain in the information. The safe harbor is intended to provide
covered entities with a simple, definitive method that does not require
much judgment by the covered entity to determine if the information is
adequately de-identified. |
Relevance
Claims
1
A method of de identifying an object data, the method comprising:
obtaining the object data, the object data being a data concerning a medical object;
identifying at least one confidential identification data in the object data, the confidential identification data being a confidential data for identifying the medical object;
filtering the confidential identification data from the object data; and
replacing the confidential identification data with at least one standard character.
Relevance
This claim is substantially the same as the federal law (HIPAA) requiring health care providers to "de-identify" medical information prior to transmitting it over non-secure networks such as the internet. In this law, personally identifying information such as name, date of birth, and social security number must be removed prior to disclosure, in order to preserve the privacy of the patient. If this patent were granted, any attempt to comply with the section of the law titled "De-Identification of Protected Health Information" would infringe on the patent. Additionally, this claim does not provide a specific method for de-identification. Rather, the trivial "method" is simply to (1) find the identifying information and (2) replace it; this is the very definition of de-identification and does not constitute a method of performing it. The other claims suffer from these same deficiencies.
This claim is substantially the same as the federal law (HIPAA) requiring health care providers to "de-identify" medical information prior to transmitting it over non-secure networks such as the internet. In this law, personally identifying information such as name, date of birth, and social security number must be removed prior to disclosure, in order to preserve the privacy of the patient. If this patent were granted, any attempt to comply with the section of the law titled "De-Identification of Protected Health Information" would infringe on the patent. Additionally, this claim does not provide a specific method for de-identification. Rather, the trivial "method" is simply to (1) find the identifying information and (2) replace it; this is the very definition of de-identification and does not constitute a method of performing it. The other claims suffer from these same deficiencies.
Claim Chart
All
