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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Appl Clin Inform 2024; 15(02): 357-367
DOI: 10.1055/a-2282-4340
Research Article

Examining the Generalizability of Pretrained De-identification Transformer Models on Narrative Nursing Notes

Fangyi Chen
1   Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States
,
Syed Mohtashim Abbas Bokhari
1   Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States
,
Kenrick Cato
2   School of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
3   School of Nursing, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States
,
Gamze Gürsoy
1   Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States
,
Sarah Rossetti
1   Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States
3   School of Nursing, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States
› Author Affiliations Funding This study was supported and funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research (1R01NR016941) and the American Nurses Foundation (ANF) Reimaging Nursing Initiative. The authors are solely responsible for the content of this work, and it does not necessarily reflect the official view of the National Institutes of Health.
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Abstract

Background Narrative nursing notes are a valuable resource in informatics research with unique predictive signals about patient care. The open sharing of these data, however, is appropriately constrained by rigorous regulations set by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for the protection of privacy. Several models have been developed and evaluated on the open-source i2b2 dataset. A focus on the generalizability of these models with respect to nursing notes remains understudied.

Objectives The study aims to understand the generalizability of pretrained transformer models and investigate the variability of personal protected health information (PHI) distribution patterns between discharge summaries and nursing notes with a goal to inform the future design for model evaluation schema.

Methods Two pretrained transformer models (RoBERTa, ClinicalBERT) fine-tuned on i2b2 2014 discharge summaries were evaluated on our data inpatient nursing notes and compared with the baseline performance. Statistical testing was deployed to assess differences in PHI distribution across discharge summaries and nursing notes.

Results RoBERTa achieved the optimal performance when tested on an external source of data, with an F1 score of 0.887 across PHI categories and 0.932 in the PHI binary task. Overall, discharge summaries contained a higher number of PHI instances and categories of PHI compared with inpatient nursing notes.

Conclusion The study investigated the applicability of two pretrained transformers on inpatient nursing notes and examined the distinctions between nursing notes and discharge summaries concerning the utilization of personal PHI. Discharge summaries presented a greater quantity of PHI instances and types when compared with narrative nursing notes, but narrative nursing notes exhibited more diversity in the types of PHI present, with some pertaining to patient's personal life. The insights obtained from the research help improve the design and selection of algorithms, as well as contribute to the development of suitable performance thresholds for PHI.

Keywords

nursing notes - i2b2 - discharge summaries - de-identification - transformers - NLP

Protection of Human and Animal Subjects

The study was approved by institutional review boards.




Publication History

Received: 01 December 2023

Accepted: 15 February 2024

Accepted Manuscript online:
06 March 2024

Article published online:
08 May 2024

© 2024. The Author(s). This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Georg Thieme Verlag KG
Rüdigerstraße 14, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany

 

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