Anonymization/Anonymization Processing
It is important to conduct medical research using medical information such as disease names, test results, and treatments in order to provide optimal medical care to each patient and to use the information for future medical care. However, it is also important to protect privacy when conducting research. For this reason, processing the information to make it impossible to recover the original information by removing information that can identify specific individuals, such as names and contact information, from the information to be studied is generally referred to as anonymization or anonymized processing.
By utilizing anonymized medical information, personal information By using anonymized medical information, we can link the medical information of each individual to the medical care of tomorrow, while protecting the privacy of the individual.
When we visit a medical institution for illness or injury, a wide range of medical information is recorded for each patient during the course of medical treatment, including medical examinations, tests, and treatment. Analysis of this medical information leads to various outcomes, such as the discovery of more effective treatments, the creation of new drugs, and the development of devices to support early detection and treatment of diseases, thereby enabling patients to receive better medical care in the future.
However, it is also important to protect privacy when conducting research. For this reason, removing information that can identify a specific individual, such as name and contact information, is generally referred to as anonymization. Research is conducted using such anonymized medical information.
Although there are various definitions of anonymization, the Japanese Personal Information Protection Law In Japan, the definition of anonymization is as follows, personal information information is processed in such a way that it cannot be used to identify individuals even if it is cross-checked with other information (this is called "anonymized information"). However, there are challenges to this. Specifically, in some cases, not only names and contact information are deleted, but medical information itself is also processed, and it has been pointed out that this hinders medical research because accurate analysis may not be possible.
For this reason, there have been discussions in Japan and abroad in recent years to establish a legal system that would allow medical research using information in which names and contact information are deleted but the medical information itself is not processed (this is generally referred to as "pseudonymization" or "pseudonym processing").