Privacy Analytics Expands Discovery and Analytic Capabilities for Anonymizing Unstructured Data with PARAT 5.4
Ottawa, ON (PRWEB) May 07, 2014 -- Privacy Analytics Inc. today launched PARAT 5.4, the company’s latest iteration of its award-winning anonymization software. PARAT 5.4’s new capabilities enable richer, more accurate analysis of geospatial and unstructured data, while allowing customers to streamline and scale their ability to anonymize personal information residing in databases of all sizes for secondary use.
PARAT 5.4 provides our customers with a robust, scalable environment to generate anonymized data for analysis,” said Khaled El Emam, CEO, Privacy Analytics Inc. “We’ve worked closely with our customers to build in key capabilities that will allow them to scale anonymization to larger and more comprehensive data sources and more complex data sets, while optimizing the data for analysis. PARAT 5.4 is part of our vision to develop vertical-specific anonymization platforms that enable our customers to get more value out of their vast data assets in a responsible and defensible way.”
PARAT 5.4 provides customers with optimal flexibility to anonymize data, either as an integrated solution or as standalone products. PARAT Text 5.4 redacts personal information, such as direct and indirect identifiers found in physician notations in structured databases and medical devices’ text fields or XML – among other data sources.
Based on feedback from customers, Privacy Analytics enhanced PARAT Text 5.4 to enable users to:
- Gain deeper insight into anonymized geospatial information in unstructured data;
8 Expand the discovery and configure the filtering of direct and indirect identifiers, including credit card numbers, driver licenses and medical codes (e.g., Healthcare Common Procedure Coding Systems and Logical Observations Identifiers Names and Codes – among others) for more accurate anonymization;
- Improve the quality of anonymized unstructured data by identifying misspellings and text errors through fuzzy matching, referencing PARAT 5.4 Text’s naming conventions in its gazetteers and dictionaries; and,
- Evaluate the measurement and tuning of precision and recall for anonymized unstructured data by comparing pre-determined samples of a data set with each other, allowing users to improve recognition rules for direct identifiers and to create an audit trial for re-identification risk.
PARAT CORE 5.4 combines de-identification and masking capabilities using a risk-based approach to anonymize personal information for structured data sets of all sizes. Its new capabilities allow organizations to automate and streamline the anonymization of complex table relationships (i.e. longitudinal data schemes), enabling the use of techniques, such as date shifting, truncation and sub-sampling, without having to re-anonymize each table in the data set.
Using a risk-based methodology to anonymize personal information in accordance with HIPAA and other legal requirements, PARAT 5.4 automates the masking and de-identification of data in standard database tables and text or XML-based documents. PARAT 5.4 masks or renders personal information, such as names, phone numbers and medical record numbers (MRNs) unrecognizable. In the same database, however, PARAT 5.4 can de-identify or alter indirect personal identifiers, such as date of birth, medical facility name, and ZIP or postal code, to enable high quality, aggregate and individual-level analysis while protecting personal information at the same time.
Secondary use is a term that describes personal health information (PHI) used outside of direct health care delivery. For example, it can be used for analysis, research, quality and safety evaluation, public health, payment, provider certification or accreditation, software testing, marketing and other business applications. In many instances, to analyze, resell or share health data without consent, however, requires that it be anonymized under very rigorous privacy standards.
About Privacy Analytics
Privacy Analytics (http://www.privacyanalytics.ca) provides organizations with enterprise software to safeguard and enable data for secondary use. It is the only company to offer its customers software, peer-reviewed methodology and valued-added services that protect the privacy of individuals when conducting critical research and complex analytics. PARAT CORE and PARAT Text are the industry’s most comprehensive software that enables the analysis of data for secondary use by integrating the anonymization of structured and unstructured information from multiple sources in compliance with HIPAA and other legal requirements.
Chris Wright, Privacy Analytics, Inc., http://www.privacyanalytics.ca, +1 (613) 369-4313 Ext: 131, [email protected]
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