Do transformers generalise better than bespoke tools for anonymisation?

Abstract

Free-text fields in clinical records contain information that may not show up in the structured health record. Automated anonymisation tools can lower the bar to using this data at scale. However, existing anonymisation tools do not always perform as well as expected when used outside of their country and domain of origin. We ran three US tertiary care targeting transformer models on 300 Australian general practice notes, and showed that they generalise better than purpose built tools.