Automated de-identification of free-text medical records

This paper presents a de-identification study at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology (HST) to automatically de-identify confidential patient information from text medical records used in intensive care units (ICUs). Patient records are a vital resource in medical research. Before such records can be made available for research studies, protected health information (PHI) must be thoroughly scrubbed according to HIPAA specifications to preserve patient confidentiality. Manual de-identification on large databases tends to be prohibitively expensive, time-consuming and prone to error, making a computerized algorithm an urgent need for large-scale de-identification purposes. We have developed an automated pattern-matching deidentification algorithm that uses medical and hospital-specific information. The current version of the algorithm has an overall sensitivity of around 0.87 and an approximate positive predictive value of 0.63. In terms of sensitivity, it performs significantly better than 1 person (0.81) but not quite as well as a consensus of 2 human de-identifiers (0.94). The algorithm will be published as open-source software, and the de-identified medical records will be incorporated into HST's Multi-Parameter Intelligent Monitoring for Intensive Care (MIMIC II) physiologic database.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Neamatullah, Ishna

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Roger G. Mark.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41622

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/41622