New technology developed by an Ottawa doctor will shield the privacy of patients by making their records anonymous while opening up their medical histories to researchers.

Dr. Khaled El Emam, who is a Canada Research Chair in the field of electronic health information at the University of Ottawa, has built software that puts parameters on any information that could identify a patient.

The software, called Privacy Analytics, works by first figuring out what information included in a medical database could identify a patient, El Emam said. From there the program measures the risk that somebody could identify a patient from the data, and if the risk is high then certain pieces of information will be modified or erased to protect patient privacy.

The program is already being tested at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario and in The Ottawa Hospital's research arm.

"One has to be very careful in terms of sharing health information to make sure it's truly anonymous ... so that we can make that available for all the good things you can do with medical data," El Emam said.

Shielding patient information is a difficult process, El Emam said, because simply stripping names is not always enough to hide a patient's identity.

"Because individuals can be unique based on their demographics, we need to be able to measure risk and find ways to reduce it," he said.

When demographic information is needed for a study, the software can be slightly modified to suit the researcher's needs. Postal codes, for example, can be cut to three characters, or stripped completely from the data.

The more information that's included, El Emam said, the greater the risk of a patient being identified.

"That's what we've been focusing on, is being able to measure that (risk), and ensure and enforce that ... privacy is going to be protected," El Emam said.

Data crucial to medical advances: researcher

Dr. Mark Walker is an epidemiologist with Ottawa Hospital Research Institute who has been using El Emam's program in his studies on disease.

"The computer program that Dr. El Emam has devised basically takes sensitive data and creates a data set from it that nobody could re-identify somebody from ... it's a bit like encryption," Walker said.

"Without this technology a lot of research we want to do would grind to a halt."

El Emam has filed a patent on the technology.