Nonspecific deidentification of date-like text in deidentified clinical notes enables reidentification of dates.
To facilitate the secondary usage of electronic health record data for research, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) recently implemented a clinical data warehouse including, among other data, deidentified clinical notes and reports, which are available to UCSF researchers without Institutional Review Board approval. For deidentification of these notes, most of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act identifiers are redacted, but dates are transformed by shifting all dates [...]
Author(s): Alexander, Jes, Beatty, Alexis
DOI: 10.1093/jamia/ocac147