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Recognition and pseudonymisation of medical records for secondary use

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Abstract

Health records rank among the most sensitive personal information existing today. An unwanted disclosure to unauthorised parties usually results in significant negative consequences for an individual. Therefore, health records must be adequately protected in order to ensure the individual’s privacy. However, health records are also valuable resources for clinical studies and research activities. In order to make the records available for privacy-preserving secondary use, thorough de-personalisation is a crucial prerequisite to prevent re-identification. This paper introduces MEDSEC, a system which automatically converts paper-based health records into de-personalised and pseudonymised documents which can be accessed by secondary users without compromising the patients’ privacy. The system converts the paper-based records into a standardised structure that facilitates automated processing and the search for useful information.

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Notes

  1. http://www.ehr4cr.eu/index.cfm.

  2. http://eurecaproject.eu/.

  3. https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/.

  4. https://gate.ac.uk/.

  5. http://www.xitrust.com/produkte/xitrust-business-server/.

  6. https://www.i2b2.org/NLP/HeartDisease/.

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Acknowledgments

We thank our business partners XiTrust Secure Technologies and Xylem Technologies for supporting the implementation of the case studies carried out within the MEDSEC project. The research was funded by BRIDGE (#824884), FFG-Austrian Research Promotion Agency, and supported by COMET K1, FFG-Austrian Research Promotion Agency.

Ethical standard

Since real-life records from a hospital archive with personal data were used in the case study, special care was taken to ensure the involved patients’ privacy. Access to the data was only allowed for the directly involved project members. Furthermore, the test data were only accessible within the archive computer network and records were not stored, copied, or processed outside the network environment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SBA Research, Favoritenstrasse 16, 1040, Vienna, Austria

    Johannes Heurix

  2. Vienna University of Technology, ISIS, Favoritenstrasse 9-11, 1040, Vienna, Austria

    Stefan Fenz & Thomas Neubauer

  3. Xitrust Secure Technologies, Grazbachgasse 67, 8010, Graz, Austria

    Antonio Rella

Authors
  1. Johannes Heurix
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  2. Stefan Fenz
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  3. Antonio Rella
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  4. Thomas Neubauer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Johannes Heurix.

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Heurix, J., Fenz, S., Rella, A. et al. Recognition and pseudonymisation of medical records for secondary use. Med Biol Eng Comput 54, 371–383 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-015-1322-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-015-1322-7

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