Proposal and evaluation of FASDIM, a Fast And Simple De-Identification Method for unstructured free-text clinical records.

Purpose: Medical free-text records enable to get rich information about the patients, but often need to be de-identified by removing the Protected Health Information (PHI), each time the identification of the patient is not mandatory. Pattern matching techniques require pre-defined dictionaries, and machine learning techniques require an extensive training set. Methods exist in French, but either bring weak results or are not freely available.