Redaction – Bulk Redaction from Search and Thoughts for GDPR

As detailed earlier in our Redacting Roadmap and as we have been posting this week, both the OpenContent Management Suite and OpenMigrate are adding capabilities for document redaction.  While previous posts posts detailed redacting content across a case folder with OpenContentCase as well as text and pattern redaction as part of an ingestion process with OpenMigrate, this post will demonstrate how to redact documents in bulk based on search criteria across a repository with OpenContent Search.

OpenContent Search Redaction

OpenContent Search provides a fast and efficient search documents across a repository.  By integrating in OpenRedact’s redaction capabilities (part of the OpenAnnotate product set), documents could always be manually redacted.  With the bulk action added to OpenContent Search, the following redaction scenario can be supported:

• User searches for a given value across the repository (example – a persons name)
• Documents are listed in a tabular format to that contain the value
• The user can review each document to verify that the name occurs
• The user can select which documents are to be redacted and select the bulk value redact
• The name of the value is automatically selected as one of the values to be deleted. Other values (birth date, address) can be manually added.
• All documents selected are redacted for the specific values configured to be redacted for this search.
• A search on the name reveals that no other documents exist with that value.

For our demonstration scenario, we will redact documents across multiple for a medical case folders.  In this scenario, we would like to the patients name, ID number, and date of birth.

GDPR Impacts

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European regulation implemented to strengthen and unify personal data protection for all European Union (EU) citizens.  The key point of GDPR is that individuals, not companies, need to have control over their personal data. While this far-reaching regulation appears to cause additional red-tape and increase costs for companies, the regulation can potentially be beneficial by reducing the amount of individual personal data stored and available to outside parties during a data breach.  See our GDPR Enterprise Content Management – Readiness Guide for additional information.

Search and bulk redaction can give an organization the ability to remove specific personal data from the documents contained within an ECM repository.  For this demonstration we showed a manual process for a specific person.  With OpenMigate automation, this process could be automated to remove any specific personal information.

Summary

Redacting documents across the repository is a common request.  OpenContent Search now contains the capabilities to redact specific fields for known values (ex: patient name) across documents in the repository.  Look here for future posts as TSG continues to add additional capabilities including redacting for patterns, calculated values (ex:  dates older than 18 years = birth dates) as well as analyze documents for additional values (ex: incident date) that could be extracted from the documents.