How to redact medical records before sharing them

Start with why you're sharing

What to hide depends on who will read the record. A clinician giving a second opinion needs the clinical content but may not need your address. A forum post or a research example needs every identifier gone. An insurer processing a claim may need most of it, so check with them first.

This is general, practical guidance, not legal advice. If you work in healthcare, follow your organisation's privacy policy and the rules that apply where you are.

Identifiers that appear in medical documents

• Patient name, date of birth, age and gender.
• Patient, hospital, lab or registration numbers, often repeated in the header of every page.
• Phone numbers, email and home address.
• Insurance or policy numbers.
• Names of the referring doctor, the lab and the hospital, which can narrow down who you are.
• Barcodes and QR codes on lab reports and labels.
• Text burned into scan images, such as names printed on an X-ray film.

How to redact a medical report

1. Open Redact medical report and drop in the PDF, scan or photo. Nothing is uploaded.
2. Names, dates of birth, phone numbers, emails and addresses are highlighted. QR codes are found too.
3. Tick any extra fields you want covered, then use find and redact for your patient ID so every page's header is covered at once.
4. Draw solid boxes over barcodes, signatures, stamps and any labels on images.
5. Export. The output is read again with OCR, and anything still legible is flagged before you download.

If someone else redacted a PDF for you, drop it into the PDF Redaction Checker to see whether text is still hiding under the boxes.

Use solid boxes for text

Patient IDs and dates are short and structured, which makes blurred versions easier to guess. Use the Solid style for them, and save blur for photos. Can blurred text be unblurred? explains why.