Electronic health records are all the rage these days. The UTA professors value of enabling medical researchers to mine the data to discover, say, more cost-effective treatments or to catch a communicable disease is pretty clear.
But there could be a few less-scrupulous uses of that information, too, given that each of those records is tied to a real, live person who didn’t sign up to tell the world about his or her private health issues.
Enter two University of Texas at Arlington professors in the school’s Computer Science and Engineering Department. Guatam Das and Heng Huang teamed to develop a computational model that will guard personal data while still allowing the medical data to be used.
Huang is principal investigator for the $740,000 project of the National Science Foundation. Researchers from the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth and George Washington University are also involved.
“It’s a fine line we’re walking,” Huang said in a UT Arlington release. “We’re trying to preserve and protect sensitive data, but at the same time we’re trying to allow pertinent information to be read.”
Award recipients
Five businesswomen from Fort Worth and one from Grapevine were honored last week as Women of Color Achievement Award recipients.
They were among 21 women from Dallas-Fort Worth to be honored by a partnership of 100 Black Men of Greater Dallas and the Women’s Presidents’ Organization. The criteria for selection included successful operation of a woman-owned or female-led business with at least $2 million in annual revenues or $1 million for a service-oriented business.
The local winners were Chi-Yeh “Angela” Han Boone, Fort Worth Gasket & Supply; Eve Clark, MEB Construction, Grapevine; Reggi Kemp, Kemp & Sons General Services; Noemi Raines, ConsignMed; Tonya Veasey, source
