Question

A healthcare analytics platform stores patient records in a shared database. Data scientists need to run cohort analyses on diagnosis codes and treatment outcomes but must never access patient names, contact details, or national identifiers. The privacy engineer is designing the technical encryption controls. Which approach BEST enforces this privacy requirement while preserving analytical utility?

Accepted Answer

Apply field-level (column-level) encryption to the direct identifier fields with keys held by a separate key management service the analytics role cannot access, leaving diagnosis and outcome fields queryable

Answer

Enable full-database transparent data encryption (TDE) so all data is encrypted at rest and decrypted automatically for any authenticated user

Answer

Encrypt the entire patient table and grant data scientists the decryption key so they can decrypt only the records they need for each analysis

Answer

Rely on TLS encryption in transit between the analytics application and the database to protect the identifier fields during queries