Hospital matching of de-identified healthcare databases without obvious quasi-identifiers

Abstract

A database merger method () merges two or more anonymized healthcare databases (X, Y). Each anonymized healthcare database has personally identifying information anonymized including having medical care units replaced by medical care unit placeholders. In the database merger method, statistical patient feature distributions are computed for medical care unit placeholders in the anonymized healthcare databases. Medical care unit placeholders in different anonymized healthcare databases are matched by matching corresponding statistical patient feature distributions for the respective medical care unit placeholders. Patients in different anonymized healthcare databases are matched. The patient matching is performed within matched pairs of medical care unit placeholders to improve computational efficiency. A databases alignment table () is generated identifying the matched patients, or a merged anonymized healthcare database is generated that merges patient features in the different anonymized healthcare databases for each matched patient into a single patient entry.