Automated Detection of Privacy Sensitive Conditions in C-CDAs: Security Labeling Services at the Department of...

Care coordination across healthcare organizations depends upon health information exchange. Various policies and laws govern permissible exchange, particularly when the information includes privacy sensitive conditions. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) privacy policy has required either blanket consent or manual sensitivity review prior to exchanging any health information. The VA experience has been an expensive, administratively demanding burden on staffand Veterans alike, particularly for patients without privacy sensitive conditions. Until recently, automatic sensitivity determination has not been feasible. This paper proposes a policy-driven algorithmic approach (Security Labeling Service or SLS) to health information exchange that automatically detects the presence or absence of specific privacy sensitive conditions and then, to only require a Veteran signed consent for release when actually present. The SLS was applied successfully to a sample of real patient Consolidated-Clinical Document Architecture(C-CDA) documents. The SLS identified standard terminology codes by both parsing structured entries and analyzing textual information using Natural Language Processing (NLP).