Protected Health Information Recognition of Unstructured Code-Mixed Electronic Health Records in Taiwan

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2022 Jun 6:290:627-631. doi: 10.3233/SHTI220153.

Abstract

Electronic health records (EHRs) at medical institutions provide valuable sources for research in both clinical and biomedical domains. However, before such records can be used for research purposes, protected health information (PHI) mentioned in the unstructured text must be removed. In Taiwan's EHR systems the unstructured EHR texts are usually represented in the mixing of English and Chinese languages, which brings challenges for de-identification. This paper presented the first study, to the best of our knowledge, of the construction of a code-mixed EHR de-identification corpus and the evaluation of different mature entity recognition methods applied for the code-mixed PHI recognition task.

Keywords: Code-Mixing; Data Anonymization; Electronic Health Record.

MeSH terms

  • Confidentiality*
  • Electronic Health Records*
  • Language
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Taiwan