Hiding in plain sight: use of realistic surrogates to reduce exposure of protected health information in clinical text

David Carrell, Bradley A. Malin, John S. Aberdeen, Samuel Bayer, Cheryl Clark, Ben Wellner, Lynette Hirschman

Abstract: Objective Secondary use of clinical text is impeded by a lack of highly effective, low-cost de-identification methods. Both, manual and automated methods for removing protected health information, are known to leave behind residual identifiers. The authors propose a novel approach for addressing the residual identifier problem based on the theory of Hiding In Plain Sight (HIPS).