Journal
JOURNAL OF MEDICAL INTERNET RESEARCH
Volume 24, Issue 3, Pages -Publisher
JMIR PUBLICATIONS, INC
DOI: 10.2196/30619
Keywords
geocode; patient privacy; ethical conduct of research; disclosure; privacy; security; identification; health information; strategy; outcome; neighborhood
Funding
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [P2CHD058486]
- National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases [R01RDK127139]
- National Library of Medicine [R00LM012868]
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Clinical epidemiology and patient-oriented health care research often use neighborhood-level data and require geocoding of patient address data to conduct the study. However, commonly used geocoding methods may reveal patients' personally identifiable information and compromise their protected health information when publishing research findings.
Clinical epidemiology and patient-oriented health care research that incorporates neighborhood-level data is becoming increasingly common. A key step in conducting this research is converting patient address data to longitude and latitude data, a process known as geocoding. Several commonly used approaches to geocoding (eg, ggmap or the tidygeocoder R package) send patient addresses over the internet to web-based third-party geocoding services. Here, we describe how these approaches to geocoding disclose patients' personally identifiable information (PII) and how the subsequent publication of the research findings discloses the same patients' protected health information (PHI). We explain how these disclosures can occur and recommend strategies to maintain patient privacy when studying neighborhood effects on patient outcomes.
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