HIMSS Word of the Day #499: Data Perturbation
Data perturbation is a privacy-preserving data mining method for electronic health records, in which data are altered on purpose so that individual values are harder to recover. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and its two approaches, then reviews six sources: the HIPAA de-identification standard, a local differential privacy study on eICU data, an HbA1c prediction study with and without privacy noise, a 2026 perturbation framework for data mining, a re-identification risk review of primary care records, and a randomized response survey of 1,200 participants in Pakistan.