Patient privacy assured by electronic censor

Newly developed software will help to allay patients' fears about who has access to their confidential data. Research published today in the open access journal BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making describes a computer program capable of deleting details from medical records which may identify patients, while leaving important medical information intact. Patient records that are to be shared within the research community must have any identifying information removed. Manual removal of identifying information is prohibitively expensive and time consuming. Considerable research by many investigators has focussed on developing automated techniques for "de-identifying" medical records. A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) aimed to solve this problem,... [read full story]