Privacy-Preserving Health Information Sharing and Integration

Speaker:        Dr. Patrick C. K. Hung
                Business and Information Technology
                University of Ontario Institute of Technology

Title:          "Privacy-Preserving Health Information Sharing
                and Integration"

Date:           Monday, 27 February 2012

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecutre Theatre F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST


Abstract:

In 2009, the Minister of Health Canada announced Canada's
commitment to promote health information technology and to speedup the
implementation of an electronic health record (EHR) system, with the
goals of improving the quality and efficiency of health services. Yet
sharing patient-specific data in its raw format poses a threat to
individuals' privacy. Many agencies employ a privacy procedure that
simply removes explicit identifiers such as name and SIN from the
published data. However, research shows that this simple procedure is
insufficient to prevent re-identification attacks. Clearly there is a
pressing need for privacy-aware health information integration and
sharing systems. Protecting patients' privacy solves only one side of
the problem. It is equally important to ensure that health professionals
such as physicians and researchers have effective access to required
information. In this seminar I will illustrate the privacy concerns in
different health information sharing and integration scenarios, and I
will present a collection of data anonymization methods and secure
protocols that address these concerns without compromising the
information utility, even for complex data mining tasks.


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Biography:

Patrick C. K. Hung is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Business
and Information Technology in University of Ontario Institute of
Technology in Canada and an Adjunct Professor at the State Key Laboratory
of Software Engineering at Wuhan University in China. He is also a Guest
Research Professor at Kingdee in ShenZhen, China. In addition, he was a
Guest Professor at Institute of Computer Science in University of
Innsbruck, Austria and Department of Information Engineering and Computer
Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy. Patrick has been working
with Boeing Research and Technology at Seattle in the USA, and he has
filed two US patent applications on "Mobile Network Dynamic Workflow
Exception Handling System" with Boeing. Before that, he was a Research
Scientist with Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organization (CSIRO) at Canberra in Australia. He also has prior
industrial experience in e-business projects in USA, Canada, China and
Hong Kong. He is a founding committee member of the IEEE International
Conference of Web Services, IEEE International Conference on Services
Computing, IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, IEEE
International Conference on Mobile Computing, and IEEE Congress on
Services. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Services
Computing, International Journal of Web Services Research and
International Journal of Business Process and Integration Management. He
has local undergraduate and graduate teaching experiences in CityU,
Baptist University, PolyU and Chinese University of Hong Kong. Patrick is
the co-designer and instructor of the mobile business certificate
programme at School of Continuing Studies in University of Toronto,
Canada. Patrick is also a co-founder of Beaconwall Limited in Hong Kong
Science Park with Prof. Jay Tashiro from the USA.

Patrick has Ph.D. and Master of Philosophy Science in Computer Science
from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong,
Master of Applied Science in Management Sciences from the University of
Waterloo in Canada, and Bachelor of Science in Computer Science at the
University of New South Wales, Australia. On the other hand, he has been
studied at CLC Japanese Language Institute at Tokyo, Japan. He has also
been a visiting graduate student at RSA Laboratories West at San Mateo,
California, USA and at Department of Information Science at Kyoto
University, Japan.