Professor of statistics Anand N. Vidyashankar is examining privacy risks related to health databases.
Currently, he is working on a study funded by the McKesson Corporation titled: "Statistical Methods for Identifying Sources of Privacy Risk and Metrics for Complex Longitudinal Data." He is trying to answer four specific questions.
First, what are the sources of privacy risk in various health databases and how can these be adopted for various healthcare databases including the ones at McKesson?
Second, for a collection of risk metrics that he recently developed with his co-authors, he is investigating their behavior across time.
Third, focusing on principled statistical approaches for decision making, he is developing methods for constructing confidence intervals for estimates of risk metrics under potential incorrect model specification?
Finally, he plans to provide recommendations for policy development for each of the metrics and suggest approaches that facilitate their implementation within a healthcare organization such as McKesson.
Vidyashankar received $160,000 McKesson for this project.
He began his work in May 2017 and will finish in late August 2018.