Development of national health data warehouse Bangladesh: Privacy issues and a practical solution

Healthcare organizations in Bangladesh own a large amount of data in diverse health information systems. Potential and useful hidden knowledge can be discovered if integration of this huge medical data is performed in national level. The integration process requires linkage of patients´ records among different heterogeneous sources. To facilitate effective data mining, it is essential to preserve record linkage in health data warehouse by retaining identifiable attributes. On the other hand, identifiable health data have high risk to patient privacy and also increase the chance of attacks by cyber criminals. In this paper, we have provided a practical solution of privacy and security problems for developing national health data warehouse of Bangladesh. Our developed technique can anonymize identifiable private data of the patients while maintaining record linkage in national warehouse to facilitate knowledge discovery process. For this purpose, we have used encrypted mobile number, gender and name-value of patients to produce Patient Identification Key. Our system is being implemented to protect privacy of sensitive health data in health data warehouse.