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Azure Health Data Services de-identification Integration

Introduction

The Azure Health Data Services (AHDS) de-identification Service is a cloud-based service that provides advanced natural language processing over raw text. One of its main functions includes Named Entity Recognition (NER), which has the ability to identify different entities in text and categorize them into pre-defined classes or types. This document will demonstrate Presidio integration with the AHDS De-Identification Service.

Supported entity categories in the Azure Health Data Services de-identification API

Azure Health Data Services de-identification supports multiple PII entity categories. The Azure Health Data Services de-identification service runs a predictive model to identify and categorize named entities from an input document. The service's latest version includes the ability to detect personal (PII) and health (PHI) information. A list of all supported entities can be found in the official documentation.

Prerequisites

To use AHDS De-Identification with Preisido, an Azure De-Identification Service resource should first be created under an Azure subscription. Follow the official documentation for instructions. The endpoint, generated once the resource is created, will be used when integrating with AHDS De-Identification, using a Presidio remote recognizer.

Azure Health Data Services de-identification Recognizer

The implementation of a AzureHealthDeid recognizer can be found here.

How to integrate Azure Health Data Services de-identification into Presidio

  1. Install the package with the ahds extra: 

    pip install "presidio-analyzer[ahds]"

  2. Define environment variables AHDS_ENDPOINT

  3. Add the AzureHealthDeidRecognizer to the recognizer registry:

from presidio_analyzer import AnalyzerEngine
from presidio_analyzer.predefined_recognizers import AzureHealthDeidRecognizer

ahds = AzureHealthDeidRecognizer()

analyzer = AnalyzerEngine()
analyzer.registry.add_recognizer(ahds)

analyzer.analyze(text="My email is email@email.com", language="en")

See also: For a full surrogate integration example, see example_ahds_surrogate.py