OBJECTIVE: To characterize the difficulty confronting investigators in removing protected health information (PHI) from cross-discipline, free-text clinical notes, an important challenge to clinical informatics research as recalibrated by the introduction of the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and similar regulations. METHODS: Randomized selection of clinical narratives from complete admissions written by diverse providers, reviewed using a two-tiered rater system and simple automated regular expression tools...
Keywords: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Computerized Medical Records Systems, medical informatics computing, natural language processing, de-identification
01/2006 | Methods of Information in Medicine, Schattauer