Human error is expensive: Here’s how companies can save time and money using automated redaction

Personally identifiable information (PII) and personal health information (PHI) are used every single day to carry out business processes in healthcare, insurance, finance, and law — nearly every industry that involves commercial transactions with consumers. 

Each time a customer gives information — like their legal name, social security, or address — to a company, they’re entrusting that organization to keep it safe from public exposure, falling into the hands of identity thieves, or worse. And companies are legally obligated to safeguard this information as well, or risk public backlash, regulatory fines, or liability in civil lawsuits.

Text redaction is the go-to method for hiding sensitive information in documents when they’re passed to other parties. Humans can manage a few documents at a time, but as the volume increases, companies are faced with either scaling review teams — which can be expensive, slow, and require significant management — or automating more of the work. Fortunately, automated redaction technology can process documents quickly and efficiently, but implementing it requires organizations to face the limits of their current processes. 

The problems with manual text redaction

Blacking out text with a permanent marker, or drawing black bars over sensitive information in Photoshop is easy enough, but replicating this work efficiently across hundreds of documents per day can be incredibly challenging. 

Text redaction is an unavoidable business process, but the amount of time, energy, and money it takes detracts from revenue generating activities — not to mention it drains your workforce. Taking shortcuts with text redaction isn’t a good idea, either. Failure to produce redacted documents in time, or human error that results in exposure of sensitive information, could lead to hefty regulatory fines. In fact, HIPAA violations could cost organizations as much as $1,806,757 per year.  

Save time and money with automated redaction

Automation technology has streamlined business processes in nearly every area, and text redaction is no different. Leveraging optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities, users can drastically cut text redaction processing times so they can focus on more critical and fulfilling work. More recently, artificial intelligence (AI) has entered the mix to supercharge these processes.

Here’s how automated redaction tools help:

Quickly discover sensitive information

Even the fastest readers will go at a snail’s pace compared to the processing speed of computers. OCR can quickly scan documents and convert their contents into usable text in just a few moments. Users can then search for instances of sensitive information and black it out, or deploy AI to find it and perform the redaction automatically. 

Redact with greater accuracy

Human error is almost guaranteed to happen at some point in a manual process. Of course, workers can miss an instance of sensitive information and fail to censor it, but there’s also the chance of drawing a box that isn’t big enough to cover all of a word, giving bad actors enough leverage to uncover the rest of the text. Users can set up automated redaction platforms to automatically identify every instance of sensitive data and block it out correctly. Tools with advanced AI can even find variations of information, such as text with misspelled words or abbreviations.

Use fewer resources

Automated redaction helps organizations keep up with demands for securely processing documents without burning out their workers, or the need to hire additional workers or outsource to third-party vendors. Outsourcing can also be legally challenging to set up and manage, depending on how sensitive the information is that needs to be redacted. Hiring a team in another country may add additional legal obligations because unredacted data is crossing into another jurisdiction.

Automation keeps sensitive information secure, since it’s handled by fewer support staff, in fewer jurisdictions, as well as reduces operational costs and prevents bottlenecks from happening when there’s a higher volume of redaction needs. 

Text redaction can’t be neglected, but Automation Hero’s advanced AI can scan documents, extract data, discover sensitive information, and execute redactions with the highest accuracy and speed. With versatile integrations, it also connects directly into your existing document workflows for seamless end-to-end processing, or it can scale to completely replace any outdated systems you may have for truly next-generation intelligent automation.