From rhoskins@home.com Sun Apr 18 05:43:36 1999 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id FAA33826 for ; Sun, 18 Apr 1999 05:43:35 -0700 Received: from ha1.rdc1.wa.home.com (siteadm@ha1.rdc1.wa.home.com [24.0.2.66]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id FAA10619 for ; Sun, 18 Apr 1999 05:43:35 -0700 Received: from c501552a ([24.5.121.123]) by ha1.rdc1.wa.home.com (Netscape Mail Server v2.02) with SMTP id AAA25572 for ; Sun, 18 Apr 1999 05:43:34 -0700 Message-ID: <002801be8999$111f0600$7b790518@olmpi1.wa.home.com> From: "Richard E. Hoskins" To: References: Subject: Re: WAPHGIS: NZ hospital admin project Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 05:43:31 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 Greg: In my state if we are doing a research project it is pretty routine to get an IRB (institutional review board) approval for using address data. If you have boundaries for the census unit and you can geocode down to the census unit then there is no reason to go down to street level. If you can't figure out what census unit they are in but you can get to the street level then you will need to do a point/polygon query in your GIS to get that info. I assume you have population numbers for the census units and you want to calculate rates? or what? Our IRB requires that we do not share the data or identifiers, or remove names. As you know calculating rates with small units like this can be a problem, so we adjust rates using empirical Bayesian smoothing methods or Tukey headbanging, the method used in the NCHS National Mortality Atlas. Richard E. Hoskins rhoskins@home.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Greg Lauer To: Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 1999 3:27 PM Subject: Re: WAPHGIS: GIS & privacy issues > I am in the middle of a writing a MSc thesis in which I am mapping hospital > addmissions, and comparing the results with socio economic status. Some of > the data I need is from the New Zealand Health Information Service (NZHIS) > which is a group with in the NZ Ministry of Health.They collect all > admission data from each hospitaI as per statutory regulation (and charge > like a wounded bull!) I need to map each admission to a meshblock ID > (census unit of approx 80 households). > > As NZ has no standard for geocoding and no useful postal zoning like US, > Canada or the UK, NZHIS cant supply the data to that level, but can supply > each individual admission address. But in NZ we have a Privacy Act that > makes the giving of personal information very difficult. So to get the data > an application has to made to the Regional Health Ethics Committee, as well > as the University Ethical committee. > > This is the first application that the Regional Health Committee has > recieved re obtaining indvidual addresses. So I am a bit of a guinea > pig...... They have no policy in place to deal with this type of request. > > Has any of the list members encountered similar problems in there > respective countries, or have a policy in place that deals with the issue > of individual data. > > And secondly, is anybody working on a similar project, or any references to > this type of project. > > Thanks in advance. > > Cheers > > Greg Lauer > PO Box 36348 > Merivale > Christchurch, New Zealand > .