Swapping from written content to electronic documents is valuable for all sorts of firms, but it comes with challenges that can be hard to manage.

One significant challenge is ensuring that susceptible data isn't accidentally shared or disclosed during the change.

If you work in healthcare, law, finance, or any domain that holds confidential data like PHI and PII, knowing how to appropriately redact data during the scanning process can safeguard your business from data violations, reputation damage, and lawful issues. In this post, we'll exemplify the redaction process.

 

Redaction Meaning

Redaction is closely tied to publishing and is a special way of reworking documents. It can involve censoring, changing, or even merging different documents or sensitive information to get them ready for publication.

This process requires careful analysis of the text, somewhat like translating. Redaction must be done very carefully to avoid accidentally sharing confidential information, committing plagiarism, or publishing the document when it shouldn't be.

 

What Makes Redaction Important?

The significance of redaction is satisfactorily understood if we peek at some instances. Probes into interference in the 2016 presidential election were led by the US Department of Justice. In 2019, they released all the related documents. These documents had a lot of sensitive information, like jury names and investigative methods. Redaction made it possible to share these documents safely. Without redaction, all this confidential information would have been exposed to the public.

This example involves legal documents, but the same risks apply to other types of documents. When sensitive information is published without proper redaction, it often contains mistakes. This is especially true for documents like scientific research papers, which might get rejected if errors or sensitive information aren’t handled correctly.

Creating a properly redacted document isn’t easy because, like translation, it varies with each case. However, there are some key things to focus on. First, grammar and spelling mistakes need to be corrected. Next, you need to adjust the tone and style. However, when confidentiality is the top priority, censoring sensitive information must come first, even before these other steps.