Not Fully Synthetic: LLM-based Hybrid Approaches Towards Privacy-Preserving Clinical Note Sharing

The publication and sharing of clinical notes are crucial for healthcare research and innovation. However, privacy regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR pose significant challenges. While de-identification techniques aim to remove protected health information, they often fall short of achieving complete privacy protection. Similarly, the current state of synthetic clinical note generation can lack nuance and content coverage. To address these limitations, we propose an approach that combines de-identification, filtration, and synthetic clinical note generation. Variations of this approach currently retain 36%-61% of the original note's content and fill the remaining gaps using an LLM, ensuring high information coverage. We also evaluated the de-identification performance of the hybrid notes, demonstrating that they surpass or at least match the standalone de-identification methods. Our results show that hybrid notes can maintain patient privacy while preserving the richness of clinical data. This approach offers a promising solution for safe and effective data sharing, encouraging further research.