Learning to identify Protected Health Information in free text

Learning to identify Protected Health Information in free text

Learning to identify Protected Health Information by integrating knowledge- and data-driven algorithms: A case study on psychiatric evaluation notes

The paper presents our experience in learning to identify personal information as part of the 2016 CEGS N-GRID Shared Tasks Track 1, which evaluated de-identification methods on a set of psychiatric evaluation notes for up to 25 different types of Protected Health Information (PHI). The methods we used rely on machine learning on either a large or small feature space, with additional strategies, including two-pass tagging and multi-class models, which both proved to be beneficial. The results show that the integration of the proposed methods can identify Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) defined PHIs with overall F1-scores of ∼90% and above. Yet, some classes (Profession, Organization) proved again to be challenging given the variability of expressions used to reference given information.