Sato Jumpei, Yamada Hiroyuki, Goda Kazuo, Kitsuregawa Masaru, Mitsutake Naohiro
The University of Tokyo, Tokyo.
Institute for Health Economics and Policy, Tokyo.
AMIA Jt Summits Transl Sci Proc. 2019 May 6;2019:345-352. eCollection 2019.
Anonymization of medical data helps protect patient identities. However, with conventional anonymized personal identifiers it is difficult to trace patients, which hinders longitudinal analyses in insurance claim database. Herein, we describe the development of a method to identify unique patients by using partial equivalence relationships of multiple anonymized personal identifiers. By using two conventional anonymized personal identifiers, we have developed virtual patient identifiers (vPIDs) to indicate unique patients. To verify the effectiveness of the developed identifiers, we have applied vPIDs to a six-year dataset of national-level Japanese insurance claims dataset and a prefectural-level insurance claims dataset with enrollee master data. In addition, we have applied vPIDs to practical analyses of medical expenditures and doctor consultations. vPID has enabled the continued tracing of patients throughout the six-year study period, and demonstrated the validity of our method. Therefore, the proposed method can be used to improve patient traceability in insurance claims database.
医学数据的匿名化有助于保护患者身份。然而，使用传统的匿名个人标识符很难追踪患者，这阻碍了保险理赔数据库中的纵向分析。在此，我们描述了一种通过使用多个匿名个人标识符的部分等价关系来识别独特患者的方法的开发。通过使用两个传统的匿名个人标识符，我们开发了虚拟患者标识符（vPID）来指示独特患者。为了验证所开发标识符的有效性，我们将vPID应用于日本国家级保险理赔数据集的六年数据集以及带有参保人主数据的县级保险理赔数据集。此外，我们将vPID应用于医疗支出和医生会诊的实际分析。vPID能够在整个六年研究期间持续追踪患者，并证明了我们方法的有效性。因此，所提出的方法可用于提高保险理赔数据库中患者的可追溯性。
