RedactOR: An LLM-Powered Framework for Automatic Clinical Data De-Identification (2505.18380v1)

Abstract: Ensuring clinical data privacy while preserving utility is critical for AI-driven healthcare and data analytics. Existing de-identification (De-ID) methods, including rule-based techniques, deep learning models, and LLMs, often suffer from recall errors, limited generalization, and inefficiencies, limiting their real-world applicability. We propose a fully automated, multi-modal framework, RedactOR for de-identifying structured and unstructured electronic health records, including clinical audio records. Our framework employs cost-efficient De-ID strategies, including intelligent routing, hybrid rule and LLM based approaches, and a two-step audio redaction approach. We present a retrieval-based entity relexicalization approach to ensure consistent substitutions of protected entities, thereby enhancing data coherence for downstream applications. We discuss key design desiderata, de-identification and relexicalization methodology, and modular architecture of RedactX and its integration with the Oracle Health Clinical AI system. Evaluated on the i2b2 2014 De-ID dataset using standard metrics with strict recall, our approach achieves competitive performance while optimizing token usage to reduce LLM costs. Finally, we discuss key lessons and insights from deployment in real-world AI- driven healthcare data pipelines.