Patient Privacy Assured By Electronic Censor

July 26, 2008

Newly developed software will help to allay patients' fears about who

has access to their confidential data. A new computer program is

capable of deleting details from medical records which may identify

patients, while leaving important medical information intact.

Patient records that are to be shared within the research community

must have any identifying information removed. Manual removal of

identifying information is prohibitively expensive and time

consuming. Considerable research by many investigators has focussed

on developing automated techniques for " de-identifying " medical

records.

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) funded by

the National Institutes of Health (NIH) aimed to solve this problem,

pointing out that: " Text-based patient medical records are a vital

resource in research. The expense of manual de-identification,

coupled with the fact that it is time-consuming and prone to error,

necessitates automatic methods for large-scale de-identification. "

The MIT team tested their censoring software on a meticulously hand-

annotated database of 1836 nursing notes (a total of 296,400 words).

According to the authors, " The software successfully deleted more

than 94% of the confidential information, while wrongly deleting only

0.2% of the useful content. This is significantly better than one

expert working alone, at least as good as two trained medical

professionals checking each other's work and many, many times faster

than either. "

The MIT team is also providing access to the fully-scrubbed annotated

data together with the software to allow others to improve their

systems, and to allow the software to be adapted to other data types

that may exhibit different qualities.

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, one

of the National Institutes of Health, funded this project.

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