The new method, published online April 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, simply disguises parts of the medical history data that are not relevant to a geneticist’s specific research question using an algorithm that looks through health records and makes some aspects of them more general.
“We’re hoping that it’s a game-changer,” says Bradley Malin, a biomedical informatics specialist from Vanderbilt University in Nashville who helped develop the method. The problem is, it's not all that difficult to follow a specific set of codes backward and identify a person, says Malin.
See articles in Science News and MIT's Technology Review.