Sharing healthcare data has become a vital requirement in healthcare system management; however, inappropriate sharing and usage of healthcare data could threaten patients’ privacy. In this article, we study the privacy concerns of sharing patient information between the Hong Kong Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service (BTS) and the public hospitals. We generalize their information and privacy requirements to the problems of centralized anonymization and distributed anonymization , and identify the major challenges that make traditional data anonymization methods not applicable. Furthermore, we propose a new privacy model called LKC-privacy to overcome the challenges and present two anonymization algorithms to achieve LKC-privacy in both the centralized and the distributed scenarios. Experiments on real-life data demonstrate that our anonymization algorithms can effectively retain the essential information in anonymous data for data analysis and is scalable for anonymizing large datasets.

Sharing healthcare data has become a vital requirement in healthcare system management; however, inappropriate sharing and usage of healthcare data could threaten patients' privacy. In this paper, we study the privacy concerns of the blood transfusion information-sharing system between the Hong Kong Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service (BTS) and public hospitals, and identify the major challenges that make traditional data anonymization methods not applicable. Furthermore, we propose a new privacy model called LKC-privacy, together with an anonymization algorithm, to meet the privacy and information requirements in this BTS case. Experiments on the real-life data demonstrate that our anonymization algorithm can effectively retain the essential information in anonymous data for data analysis and is scalable for anonymizing large datasets.