redacta

What This Skill Does

Redacta is an essential utility for healthcare professionals, researchers, and developers working with medical records. It serves as a secure, intelligent pseudonymisation layer for patient data. By automatically identifying and replacing sensitive information like NHS numbers, hospital MRNs, names, addresses, and phone numbers with standardized tokens (e.g., [NHS_NUMBER], [PATIENT_NAME]), Redacta enables clinical text to be processed, analyzed, or stored by AI systems without compromising patient privacy or violating data governance policies such as GDPR or HIPAA.

Unlike basic pattern matchers, Redacta leverages contextual reasoning to distinguish between a patient name and a consultant's name, or between a clinical appointment date and a birth date, ensuring that vital clinical data remains readable while identifiers are safely obfuscated.

Installation

You can add Redacta to your OpenClaw agent by running the following command in your terminal or command interface:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/nickjlamb/redacta

Use Cases

• Clinical Summarization: Prepare discharge summaries for an LLM to generate concise patient timelines without sending PII to cloud providers.
• Research Data Prep: Anonymize large datasets of patient encounters to facilitate analysis or training of localized medical AI models.
• Patient Communication Security: Ensure that patient identifiers are removed before passing communication logs into customer support or analysis tools.
• Compliance Auditing: Automatically redact sensitive data from legacy document archives prior to migration or cloud indexing.

Example Prompts

1. "Redacta, please pseudonymise the following discharge summary so I can safely analyze the clinical progression of the case: [paste document content]"
2. "I have a list of patient notes that include names and hospital IDs. Run Redacta on these and provide a report of all items removed."
3. "Can you process this clinical transcript using Redacta and ensure that all mentions of the patient's age and address are replaced with tokens?"

Tips & Limitations

• Contextual Accuracy: While Redacta is highly accurate, always review sensitive documents once after processing to ensure non-standard formatting hasn't caused a missed identifier.
• Clinician Names: Redacta is specifically trained to preserve the names of medical professionals to maintain the clinical context of treatment recommendations.
• Modulus Validation: When handling NHS numbers, the tool performs a Modulus 11 check to ensure that strings matching the digit pattern are indeed valid identifiers, reducing false positives.
• Complexity: Complex handwriting or extremely non-standard shorthand notes might require additional manual review.