About the Authors

Khaled El Emam

kelemam@uottawa.ca

Affiliations Electronic Health Information Laboratory, CHEO Research Institute, Ottawa, Canada, Department of Paediatrics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

Elizabeth Jonker

Affiliation Electronic Health Information Laboratory, CHEO Research Institute, Ottawa, Canada

Luk Arbuckle

Affiliation Electronic Health Information Laboratory, CHEO Research Institute, Ottawa, Canada

Bradley Malin

Affiliations Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America

Competing Interests

The authors have read the journal's policy and have the following conflicts: all co-authors perform consulting to federal and provincial governments and commercial entities in the US and Canada on de-identification. KEE and BM sit on federal and provincial government advisory committees related to health information privacy. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLoS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: KEE LA BM. Performed the experiments: KEE EJ LA BM. Analyzed the data: KEE EJ LA BM. Wrote the paper: KEE EJ LA BM.