ABSTRACT
There are five alternative methods to de-identification that can provide access to health information that are in common use today or are expected to increase in use in the near future. These are (1) remote access to data, (2) on-site access to data, (3) remote execution, (4) remote query, and (5) secure computation. They have a number of advantages and disadvantages compared to de-identification, which will be summarized below. On balance, we argue that in practice de-identification remains an attractive method in many situations compared to the alternatives.
