Last update and review: May 31, 2022.
A short summary.
Instructions on how to remove personal information from your laboratory test results before sending them over the Internet.
Introduction.
Online consultations in health and medical issues are becoming more and more popular. This is a positive phenomenon. Indeed, in many cases, online consultations are a viable alternative to the medical system imposed by the alliance of bureaucracy, private and public health care behemoths, and pharma industry.
Optimally, medical information sent over the internet should be anonymized. In particular, personal information, such as names, the addresses, phone numbers, and similar, should be removed from the results of laboratory tests that are sent over the Internet to a medical practitioner or consultant.
In our consultancy, we only keep anonymized, redacted copies of laboratory tests and of other medical information of our consulting clients.
It is helpful, if our consulting clients send us their laboratory tests and other information already in redacted form, already without their personal information.
Instructions on how to remove personal information from your laboratory test results.
There are different ways to redact (i.e. remove information, and in particular, personal information) from your files. We prepared a short guide on one of the ways our consulting clients can redact their documents before sending them.
The software mentioned in the guide is free. That is, if we don’t count Microsoft Word. But Word has a lot of free alternatives. However, the software we mention is far from perfect. If you have something better installed on your computer, notably, something that handles PDF files well, use it instead.
An update from May 31, 2022: LibreOffice Draw is a free Open Source software that allows editing PDF files. Use it as an alternative to Foxit Reader.
An update from May 31, 2022: The currently available free versions of Foxit Reader software do not allow saving PDF files in Word (.doc, .docx) or in RTF(.rtf) format. Some of our clients tried other free alternative PDF software but the results were not always satisfactory. Sometimes, “redacted” files would still contain personal information.
Therefore, as an alternative to using Foxit Reader and Microsoft Office Word, we suggest LibreOffice Draw. LibreOffice Draw allows editing PDF files and has “Find and Replace” function. LebreOffice Draw is free and Open Source. It can be used with older versions of Windows and of other operating systems.
The screenshots below illustrate the procedure with LibreOffice Draw.
The end of the update from May 31, 2022.
Your laboratory test results will often be in the PDF format. There is a lot of free PDF software that allows saving a PDF file as a Word or RTF file. The software we used is a free version of Foxit PDF Reader. For this guide, we used the test results published online by Kevin Stock, a health personality. Kevin shared his results on the Internet publically.
1. Open the file you want to redact with your PDF software and save the file in the Word (.doc, .docx) or in RTF(.rtf) format.
2. Open the Word or RTF file that you just created with Microsoft Word, with Open Office, or with other similar software.
3. Go to Edit>Replace. In the “Find what” field put the word/words you want to remove. In the “Replace with” field put XXXXX or other characters that will replace the word/words you want to remove. Hit “Replace all”.
4. Repeat the operation until all the personal information is removed.
5. We recommend removing the name, the address, the phone number, occasionally, a “patient number”. The year of birth may be left in the document since this information may be useful to medical practitioners. The month and the day of birth may be removed.
As an option, our consulting client may select a “handle” to replace his name with instead of XXXXX. For instance, for Kevin Stock, a handle could be Kvn-S-Oct-31-2019. The date is the date the consulting client first got in contact with us.
For the file name, again as an option, you may want to use the following:
Kvn-S-Oct-31-2019 – lab tests done Sept 27, 2018, where Kvn-S-Oct-31-2019 is a handle, and “lab tests done Sept 27, 2018” refers to the date when the analyte (blood, urine, etc.) was collected.
6. As an option, you can save the anonymized Word or RTF file in PDF format before sending it. Sometimes, word processors, like Microsoft Office Word, do not open correctly documents created on other computers.
In our consultancy, we use a good software to batch redact medical information in the files sent by our consulting clients. However, our software is not perfect and time is still required to do the redaction. Therefore, we greatly appreciate when our consulting clients anonymize their files before sending them to us.