Title
De-identifying an EHR database - anonymity, correctness and readability of the medical record.
Abstract
Electronic health records (EHR) contain a large amount of structured data and free text. Exploring and sharing clinical data can improve healthcare and facilitate the development of medical software. However, revealing confidential information is against ethical principles and laws. We de-identified a Danish EHR database with 437,164 patients. The goal was to generate a version with real medical records, but related to artificial persons. We developed a de-identification algorithm that uses lists of named entities, simple language analysis, and special rules. Our algorithm consists of 3 steps: collect lists of identifiers from the database and external resources, define a replacement for each identifier, and replace identifiers in structured data and free text. Some patient records could not be safely de-identified, so the de-identified database has 323,122 patient records with an acceptable degree of anonymity, readability and correctness (F-measure of 95%). The algorithm has to be adjusted for each culture, language and database.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.3233/978-1-60750-806-9-862
Studies in Health Technology and Informatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Electronic Health Record,de-identification,database,confidentiality
Medical software,Data mining,World Wide Web,Identifier,Confidentiality,Computer science,Correctness,Readability,Medical record,Anonymity,Data model,Database
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
169
0926-9630
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
1
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kostas Pantazos1164.10
Søren Lauesen214822.08
S Lippert331.49