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Case study

The challenge

For any company dealing with personal health information, privacy and compliance are of the utmost importance. One of the largest pharmaceutical companies needed to securely share statement of work files that include critical and confidential internal information outside the company, with board members, consultants and its network of subcontractors. To achieve this, the sensitive information needed to be redacted from the documents before sharing.

Prior to this engagement, a group of people manually redacted sensitive information and verified that process. Our client was looking for an automated way to reduce manual work and speed this process. 

Our approach

The purpose of redaction is to mask trade secrets, research and development information, contract amounts, project status data, and client or patient records. For this client, we selected the Microsoft Azure AI/ML platform to build an intelligent business solution to provide real-time redaction of PDF documents using optical character recognition.

Additionally, the system removes critical data completely using rule-based automation. It then generates a concise and meaningful summary of text from multiple documents using natural language processing. This complete process flow eliminates most of the manual intervention and reduces the risk of human error by verifying the document.

 

Multiple benefits of end-to-end data protection with AI

This life sciences company now has end-to-end automation using Azure ML, improved confidentiality, stronger compliance and business oversight, as well as mitigation of regulatory, legal and commercial risk.

80% reduction

in manual effort evaluating and validating masked entities

50% faster

processing through automation

~30% decrease

in cost with the reduction in manual effort and human error