De-identification of Patient Notes with Recurrent Neural Networks

Understand

Objective: Patient notes in electronic health records (EHRs) may contain critical information for medical investigations.

• However, the vast majority of medical investigators can only access de-identified notes, in order to protect the confidentiality of patients.
• In the United States, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) defines 18 types of protected health information (PHI) that needs to be removed to de-identify patient notes.
• Manual de-identification is impractical given the size of EHR databases, the limited number of researchers with access to the non-de-identified notes, and the frequent mistakes of human annotators.