Sensitive data can be reused in many ways to improve healthcare services, uncover new insights and opportunities that can influence healthcare strategies, and develop data products that address societal health needs. Health data can be particularly sensitive as it can reveal a lot about an individual’s medical history and lifestyle.
There are many dimensions to the safe and responsible reuse of data, which can also be thought of in terms of defense in depth, ie, protecting data from unauthorized access and misuse through layers of administrative and technical controls. Technical privacy models are one such control as they are used to assess the risk of disclosure and determine appropriate data transformations that will eliminate those risks.
Differential privacy is a technical privacy model that protects individuals by requiring that the information contributed by any individual does not significantly affect the output. More specifically, differential privacy is a mathematical property that defines an adjustable information limit.
