Montreal Accord on Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs) use series - Paper 9: anonymization and ethics considerations for capturing and sharing patient reported outcomes.

Background: Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are collected with consent for care; however, using the data for any other purpose requires consent for that additional purpose, or the anonymization of the data. Collecting explicit consent to use this data for secondary purposes, before the patient completes a PRO, can also bias the responses.

Objective: We consider the ethical and security issues related to the collection of data at the point of care or in the population and the aggregation and integration of PRO data with administrative databases to facilitate decision making and comparative effectiveness research.

Secure surveillance of antimicrobial resistant organism colonization or infection in Ontario long term care homes.

Background: There is stigma attached to the identification of residents carrying antimicrobial resistant organisms (ARO) in long term care homes, yet there is a need to collect data about their prevalence for public health surveillance and intervention purposes.

Objective: We conducted a point prevalence study to assess ARO rates in long term care homes in Ontario using a secure data collection system.

Methods: All long term care homes in the province were asked to provide colonization or infection counts for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), and extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) as recorded in their electronic medical records, and the number of current residents.

Privacy and anonymity challenges when collecting data for public health purposes.

Two contemporary problems face public health professionals in collecting data from health care providers: the de-identification of geospatial information in a manner that still allows meaningful analysis, and ensuring that provider performance data (e.g., infection or screening rates) is complete and accurate.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors for unipolar depression: a systematic review of classic long-term randomized controlled trials.

Background: Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are increasingly used in the long-term treatment of depression. Much of the supporting evidence about the effects of these drugs comes from discontinuation trials, a variant of randomized controlled trials whose design is problematic to interpret. We conducted a systematic review to examine the efficacy and acceptability of long-term therapy with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors relative to placebo in the treatment of unipolar depression.