BoB - a Best-of-Breed automated clinical text de-identification system

BoB is an automated clinical text de-identification system developed within the Consortium for Healthcare Informatics Research (CHIR) at the Department of Veterans Affairs. For its development, we studied several existing de-identification systems implementing the best methods from these systems as well as other later developed features to de-identify Veterans Health Administration clinical documents. BoB consists of a UIMA-based NLP framework with different NLP procedures, pattern matching techniques, as well as machine learning-based predictions. BoB’s design is based on two major modules developed to achieve high sensitivity and precision.