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Comment by jonlucc | Hacker News Reader

There are well-considered standards for patient anonymity. Saying "I had a patient with X disease" is not compromising the identity of the patient. Without that, doctors couldn't teach medicine to med students or explain their cases at conferences.

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Fair enough, but I'm not sure that will be good enough for much longer. With bigger and better datasets it should be increasingly easy to de-anonymize someone based on just knowing something like that.

Something like what, that a specific doctor has treated someone with a specific condition? I'm not sure that's enough metadata.

I can confirm that's not and could never be a HIPAA violation. The information that Doctor X once ordered a blood test for John or Jane Doe with Result Z is totally fine. There's no non-HIPAA violating metadata that could make that information useful.

There are papers about de-anonimizing patient records and they show that for instance, patient records + facebook is definitely enough to fill in the names correctly.

You do realize that with your standard of never-say-anything you're calling pretty much 200 years of medical study on violation.

That sounds great until you read the original stories detailing how they arrived at these standards.

I mean it's utilitarian attitude on the surface, but the usefulness of medicine will be significantly degraded for everyone if patient records become public records.

> the usefulness of medicine will be significantly degraded for everyone if patient records become public records

Huh? The reason why doctor-patient confidentiality exists is to encourage people to seek treatment without fear of embarrassment or retaliation.

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