DEDUCE: A pattern matching method for automatic de-identification of Dutch medical text

In order to use medical text for research purposes, it is necessary to de-identify the text for legal and privacy reasons. We report on a pattern matching method to automatically de-identify medical text written in Dutch, which requires a low amount of effort to be hand tailored. First, a selection of Protected Health Information (PHI) categories is determined in cooperation with medical staff. Then, we devise a method for de-identifying all information in one of these PHI categories, that relies on lookup tables, decision rules and fuzzy string matching. Our de-identification method DEDUCE is... Mehr ...