"A Systems Approach to Data Privacy in the Biomedical Domain" (CRCS Lunch Seminar)

Presentation Date: 

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar

Date: Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Speaker: Bradley Malin
Title: A Systems Approach to Data Privacy in the Biomedical Domain

Abstract: The healthcare community has made considerable strides in the development and deployment of information systems, with particular gains in electronic health records and cheap genome sequencing technologies. Given the recent passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and the HITECH Act in particular, advancement and adoption of such systems is expected to grow at unprecedented rates. The quantity of patient-level data that will be generated is substantial and can enable more cost-effective care as well as support a host of secondary uses, such biomedical research and biosurveillance. At the same time, care must be taken to ensure that such records are accessed and shared without violating a patient’s privacy rights.

The construction and application of data privacy technologies in the biomedical domain is a complex endeavor and requires the resolution of often competing computational, organizational, regulatory, and scientific needs. In this talk, I will introduce how the Vanderbilt Health Information Privacy Laboratory builds and applies data privacy solutions to support various biomedical settings. Our solutions are rooted in computational formalisms, but are driven by real world requirements and, as such, draw upon various tools and techniques from a number of fields, including cryptography, databases and data mining, public policy, risk analysis, and statistics. Beyond a high-level overview, I will delve into recent research on how we are measuring and mitigating privacy risks when sharing patient-level data from electronic medical and genomic records from the Vanderbilt University Medical Center to local researchers and an emerging de-identified repository at the National Institutes of Health.

Bio: Brad Malin is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering at Vanderbilt University. He is the founder and director of the Vanderbilt Health Information Privacy Laboratory (HIPLab), which focuses on basic and applied research in a number of health-related areas, including primary care and secondary sharing of patient-specific clinical and genomic data. His research has received several awards of distinction from the American and International Medical Informatics Associations and the HIPLab is currently supported by grant funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Veterans Health Administration. For the past several years, he has directed a data privacy research and consultation team for the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) project, a consortium sponsored by the National Human Genome Research Institute. He has served as a program committee member and workshop chair for numerous conferences on data mining, privacy, and medical informatics. He has also edited several volumes for Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, a special issue for the journal Data and Knowledge Engineering, and is currently on the editorial board of the journal Transactions on Data Privacy. He received a bachelor’s in biology (2000), master’s in knowledge discovery and data mining (2002), master’s in public policy & management (2003), and a doctorate in computation, organizations & society (2006) from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

His home on the web can be found at http://www.hiplab.org/people/malin