Dashboard data obfuscation

[ecarlstrom]

While it's useful to share reports in healthcare a common issue that comes up is the content of the reports. If there is any Personal Health Information in a report (or in the details within the report) it is important to be able to obscure that information. Some companies who have built their own reporting solutions take care of this on their end. I was wondering if there was anything within PowerBI that would allow a report write to do this type of obfuscation so dashboards could be created with the possibility of violating HIPAA removed because any PHI would not be viewable in case someone shared the dashboard link with someone they shouldn't have. 

[v-jiascu-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @ecarlstrom,

I think this should be done in the Power Query at the first place in Power BI. Remove columns, replace values or filter out records etc. You also can create an idea here: https://ideas.powerbi.com. Maybe we can have it in the future.

Best Regards!

Dale

[MattAllington]

you can use Row Level Security however this provides access to data or not. I generally advise that you should assume that anyone that can see a report can also see the underlying data. The exception I guess is if you give read only access and also disable Analyse in Excel. You would want to test it fully of course. 

[ecarlstrom]

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@MattAllington wrote:

you can use Row Level Security however this provides access to data or not. I generally advise that you should assume that anyone that can see a report can also see the underlying data. The exception I guess is if you give read only access and also disable Analyse in Excel. You would want to test it fully of course. 

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Unfortunately I don't think that would work. Being able to see the results of metrics etc would be the reason for the dashboard, but any underlying patient specific data (name, date of birth, etc) would need to be obfuscated. The other option mentioned by Dale sounds closer, but I'm definitely going to post something in the ideas. 

Erik

[ecarlstrom]

While it's useful to share reports in healthcare a common issue that comes up is the content of the reports. If there is any Personal Health Information in a report (or in the details within the report) it is important to be able to obscure that information. Some companies who have built their own reporting solutions take care of this on their end. I was wondering if there was anything within PowerBI that would allow a report write to do this type of obfuscation so dashboards could be created with the possibility of violating HIPAA removed because any PHI would not be viewable in case someone shared the dashboard link with someone they shouldn't have.