Posted by Michael Wonder on 18 Dec 2017
Not so anonymous: Medicare data can be used to identify individual patients, researchers say
18 December 2017 - Researchers say they can identify individuals in government healthcare data that was supposed to be anonymous, potentially exposing private information of people receiving mental health treatment or HIV medication.
Published by the federal Department of Health in August 2016 as part of a move towards open data, the historical information included the medical and pharmaceutical bills of about 10% of Australians.
It was pulled offline last year after experts from the University of Melbourne were able to decrypt or decode a number of doctor ID numbers.
