What this lens detects
Six entity classes tightly scoped to the physical / organizational topology of a healthcare facility:
- Hospital names — full institutional names plus the common-usage shorthand (
Mercy,St. Luke's North). - Clinic names — outpatient clinics, urgent-care branches, specialty practices affiliated with a hospital.
- Department names —
Cardiology,ED,OR,ICU, etc., as contextual labels. - Room numbers —
Room 412,412B,4-North-22, the variations real hospitals use. - Bed identifiers — bed-level identifiers used by bed-management systems.
- Ward designations — ward / unit / floor-level designations distinct from individual rooms.
This is a narrower lens than Healthcare. It doesn’t try to find providers, medications, or symptoms — just the spatial / organizational identifiers. Load it in addition to Healthcare when those identifiers are the binding constraint of your workload.
When to use this
- Bed-management and patient-flow analytics — the analytics pipeline needs room and ward identifiers redacted before landing in the warehouse.
- Discharge-planning and care-coordination tools — outbound messages to home-health agencies, transportation services, or family members should not carry room and bed identifiers.
- Hospital security and incident reporting — incident reports often mention exact location; redaction-by-room avoids re-identifying patients via location.
- Operations-research data sharing — sharing operational data with academic partners or vendors for capacity-planning research; room and ward identifiers are quasi-identifiers under the HIPAA Safe Harbor “addresses” clause.
Always combine with Healthcare for full clinical-text coverage.
Known limitations
- Numeric overlap. Room number patterns (3-4 digits, sometimes with letter suffixes) overlap with other numeric sequences in clinical text. The lens uses surrounding context to disambiguate; recall against a labeled corpus is still the calibration step.
- Institution-specific room schemes. Some hospitals use highly idiosyncratic room-numbering (
4-NW-22b-1); coverage is good on the common patterns and degrades on the unusual ones. Add a custom-identifier regex in the policy layer for the institution-specific scheme. - English-only. Bilingual hospital signage / chart notation isn’t trained.