Skip to main content
Version: v0.2.7

@cosyte/deid

Apply a HIPAA-grounded de-identification policy to a healthcare document's structurally-located model and get back a transformed model plus a value-free manifest of everything acted on, without reading 45 CFR §164.514 or hand-writing a scrubber.

@cosyte/deid is a consumer-tier library, not a parser. It borrows the Cosyte parser archetype's disciplines (typed diagnostics, immutable output, a policy/profile system) but inverts the parser's reflex: where a parser is liberal on input (Postel's Law), a de-identifier is conservative: an unrecognized structure or an un-locatable identifier is blocked, never passed through as safe.

The honesty line that governs the whole library. Results are "Safe-Harbor-transformed per the configured policy", never "de-identified" and never "HIPAA-compliant". Safe Harbor is implemented mechanically; the §164.514(b)(2)(ii) actual-knowledge condition is the consumer's; Expert Determination (§164.514(b)(1)) is supported, never rendered or certified. The certification is always the consumer's.

Who it is for​

Teams that hold healthcare documents in one of the six formats and need a copy transformed under a stated policy, with a value-free record of what was done where. It is not a detector of identifiers in prose (free text is blocked unless you bring your own redactor), and it is not a certification: the actual-knowledge condition and any Expert Determination stay with the organization that releases the data.

Status: 0.1, published to npm. Below 1.0, a breaking change raises the minor version and the changelog says what broke. This release ships the format-agnostic core (policy engine, five transforms, 18-category Safe Harbor model, fail-closed rule, value-free manifest) plus six format bindings: HL7 v2 (@cosyte/deid/hl7), C-CDA (@cosyte/deid/ccda), FHIR R4 (@cosyte/deid/fhir), X12 EDI (@cosyte/deid/x12), NCPDP Telecom (@cosyte/deid/ncpdp) and DICOM (@cosyte/deid/dicom). NCPDP SCRIPT is not supported, and an entry point handed one refuses it outright rather than returning a partial pass.

Install​

npm install @cosyte/deid

The 30-second version​

import { deidentify, SAFE_HARBOR_CATEGORIES } from "@cosyte/deid";

const { document, manifest } = deidentify(
  {
    loci: [
      {
        path: "PID-19",
        kind: "identifier",
        category: SAFE_HARBOR_CATEGORIES.SSN,
        value: "900-00-0001",
      },
    ],
  },
  {},
);

document.loci[0]?.value; // => null
manifest[0]?.category; // => "SSN"
manifest[0]?.locus; // => "PID-19"
JSON.stringify(manifest).includes("900-00-0001"); // => false

The value is removed, and the manifest records the category and the locus, never the value.

Next​