Hercules Dalianis and Sumithra Velupillai participated at the Virtual Healthcare Interaction – VHI 09, AAAI 2009 Fall Symposium Series, November 5-7, Arlington, VA, USA. They hold a panel with the title Is De-identification of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) Possible? – Use of Health Record Corpora for Research. Various issues regarding de-identification, anonymization, pseudonymisation and re-identification were discussed. One important aspect
that was brought up, was the importance of considering the distortion of de-identified textual data, i.e. how much important information is lost in de-identified data? One possible approach that was mentioned was to use a Blackbox approach; not letting the researcher reach the data at all, while still being able to apply information access methods! Panel proposal in PDF.
The Virtual Healthcare Interaction also contained presentations of research on the creation of virtual patients for training physicians and students but also virtual clinicians to help patients to be more aware of their deceases and their treatment, to involve both patients and their relatives in the health care procedure. Summarizing, visualizing and tailoring patient records for different user groups. The VHI had almost 30 participants but the whole Fall symposium contained seven different tracks with over 150 participants.
