MIT Technology Review covers CS Professor and ITI researcher Carl Gunter's work on SHARPS DS2 (Decision Support for Data Segmentation), a way to make electronic health records more granular, which will increase privacy for patients.
Can Software Make Health Data More Private?
New software could give people greater control over how their personal health information is shared between doctors and medical institutions—provided that enough health providers decide to use the system.
Today a patient's data typically stays within a hospital group or doctor's practice. If you get care elsewhere you are essentially a blank slate unless a special request for your data is made, in which case the entire record becomes accessible. But many patients may not want their entire medical history to be accessible by everyone they see, so there is pressure to develop tools that can be used to limit access. One tricky issue is that redacting details of a diagnosis may not remove all the clues as to that condition, such as prescribed drugs or lab tests.
Read more in Technology Review.
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