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New ‘censoring’ software eliminates personal data from medical records.

Software developers in the US have created a programme which can scan medical documents to safely remove any personal information while leaving the important case details intact. This leaves the records open for use by the general medical community.
 
The process, known as ‘de-identification’, is currently undertaken by hand and is a costly and time-consuming process.
 
The team, from the US bodies the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), started the process by testing on a database of 1836 nursing notes, and found it to be extremely accurate. According to the team, who said: "The software successfully deleted more than 94 per cent of the confidential information, while wrongly deleting only 0.2 per cent of the useful content. This is significantly better than one expert working alone, at least as good as two trained medical professionals checking each other's work and many, many times faster than either."
 
The research is published in the online journal BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. 
  

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