title: Replacing personally-identifying information in medical records, the Scrub system.
abstract: We define a new approach to locating and replacing personally-identifying information in medical records that extends beyond straight search-and-replace procedures, and we provide techniques for minimizing risk to patient confidentiality. The straightforward approach of global search and replace properly located no more than 30-60% of all personally-identifying information that appeared explicitly in our sample database. On the other hand, our Scrub system found 99-100% of these references. Scrub uses detection algorithms that employ templates and specialized knowledge of what constitutes a name, address, phone number and so forth.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Sweeney
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003219:Confidentiality; D006801:Humans; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized