Practical Implementation and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence-Driven Electronic Health Record Evaluation: Protected Health Information

Detecting protected health information in electronic health record systems is often an early step in health care analytics, and it is a nontrivial problem. Specific challenges include finding clinician names and diseases, which lack a fixed format and are often context-dependent. The general problem of finding entities, termed named-entity recognition, has received a substantial amount of attention in the natural language processing and deep learning communities. This paper begins by outlining recent methods for finding protected health information, and it then introduces a hybrid system which combines regular expressions with a natural language processing framework called FLAIR. FLAIR is open-source, it includes state-of-the-art deep learning models, and it supports straightforward development of new models for language tasks including named-entity recognition. Finally, there is a discussion of how to apply the system to structured text in a database table as well as unstructured text in clinical notes.