De-Identify Sensitive PHI and SSN Fields. Auditable, Data Deidentification for PCI, HIPAA, etc.

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Field-Level De/Re-Identification

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Encode Sensitive Data (Recoverable Protection)

Challenges:

Do you need to change the individualizing characteristics of data so that a personal, or other, data item stored in the original field cannot be identified, but nonetheless remain individualized? This way, files could flow safely de-identified through different departments, and where necessary, be re-identified.

Sensitive field data must also be replaced with altered (but reversible) output, and maintain the characteristics of the original field (like the length, data type, or even a real-looking but different value). Field-level encryption does not accomplish this goal because the ciphertext result is usually longer than the original field and will not be recognizable.

Solutions:

Both the FieldShield package and the CoSort product's SortCL tool provide several ways to de-identify personal health information (PHI) and other sensitive field data (like a social security or cell phone number) in your files. At the same time, the de-identified field can look more realistic and still be recovered.

You can de-identify private fields in these ways:

Use the built-in de-identification function to encode fields with ASCII characters
Specify lookup (set) files to substitute sensitive field values with a pseudonym
Transform the field with one or more data manipulations
De-identify or encode the data with your own field-level transformation function

Example of the function-based de-identification option offered in CoSort's Graphical User Interface - to - Sort Control Language (gui2scl) Java client application. In this example, the SSN field in a file is de-identified.

These field-level de-identification methods can help you comply with certain privacy regulations, leave your non-sensitive data and files available for further processing, and produce an XML audit trail to help you verify compliance. However, de-ID functions may not provide the robust levels of security and recoverability that FieldShield and SortCL's built-in AES-256 encryption function affords (see Encryption).

If you are interested in de-identifying real data through the generation of test data instead, please look into the metadata-compatible RowGen tool for test file, report and table targets.

IRI, The CoSort Company