How to Collect Consent for an Anonymous Medical Database

摘要

The goal of some medical databases is not to support the actual treatment of individual patients, but to provide the platform for medical research. Health data collected in such databases have to be anynomized - they should be analyzed only statistically and should not permit to retrieve the patient's identity. Medical data collected for research should be anonymized to protect the patients' privacy. In many countries it is mandatory. In many cases, not only one person treats a patient for a given illness. The documentation of a case requires the collaboration of different physicians that share information. This sharing of information requires the patient to authorise the access to the data stored by one physician by another one. We need therefore to implement a system for collecting the consent of an anonymous person. We present a novel solution to allow the practitioner to collect the consent of the patient in order to access the data recorded for that person. This solution is based on existing infrastructure, such as X509 certificates (present in e-ID or e-Health cards). Patients do not require to acquire any new hardware or to remember any new secret. We produce the fingerprint of the private key of the patient that can be used to re-identify the patient without having to know the identity of the patient (for instance the certificate) or even the patient's public key.