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Over the years, most hospital IT teams have developed their own HL7 test messages and logs, which they use over and over again for system testing and interface validation. These logs may not be 100% accurate for the task at hand but hey, they’re good enough, right?

Not really.

“Good-enough” logs don’t contain the latest lab codes. “Good-enough” logs with just 10 or 20 or even 50 patients don’t contain the volume you need for load and performance testing. “Good-enough” logs miss [...]

One of our Cloak customers is de-identifying close to 14 GB of clinical data coming from several healthcare information systems (including 2 ADTs and a lab system) at an IDN. This customer is asking some great questions that would help other Cloak users get more out of the software. Here’s an excerpt from our conversations.

The NK1 segment is giving me trouble. Specifically, field 5, the address. I created a sample message with this as the NK1.5 content:

123 EASY ST^Arlington^VA^22207

The NK1 [...]

One of our Cloak customers is de-identifying several GB of clinical data coming from several healthcare information systems (including 2 ADTs and a lab system) at an IDN. This customer is asking some great questions that would help other Cloak users get more out of the software. Here’s an excerpt from our conversations. We’ll be posting new Q&As in the coming weeks.

Is there a means by which the names in a message can be de-identified, i.e. patient, physician, etc., without [...]

Information Week ran an article this week on protecting patient data. The article wasn’t on one of the usual suspects — a HIPAA violation or a breach in a production system. Instead, this was notable because we’re finally seeing one of the hidden dangers in healthcare IT coming to light: unsecured patient data sitting in development and test systems. Our industry needs to start addressing this issue.

Information Week cited a survey where 51% of organizations don’t protect patient data used [...]

Definitions

We’re continuing with our series of posts on patient data de-identification. This week, we’re reviewing a set of definitions of common terms. This list will become the glossary for upcoming posts on HL7 de-identification and protecting sensitive healthcare data. We’re looking for feedback on this list. Feel free to add your nuances and/or related terms in the comments…

De-Identification or Anonymization

An umbrella term for removing or masking protected information. In a more specific sense, the de-identification process removes identifiers from a [...]

In healthcare IT, no matter where you work, you’re faced with protecting patient data. Many countries have regulatory frameworks to address patient privacy and the use of health information. In the US, HIPAA regulates the use of PHI (protected health information). In Canada, the law is called PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act). PIPEDA regulates the use of consumer data in a number of industries, not just healthcare. Plus a few Canadian provinces have their own privacy legislation [...]