As medical data continues to transition to electronic formats, opportunities arise for researchers to use this microdata to discover patterns and increase knowledge that can improve patient care. We propose a data utility measurement, called the research value (RV), which reflects the importance of an database attribute with respect to the other database attributes in a dataset as well as reflect the significance of the content of the data from a researcher's point of view. Our algorithms use these research values to assess an attribute's data utility as it is generalizing the data to ensure k-anonymity. The proposed algorithms scale efficiently even when using datasets with large numbers of attributes.