Watch our video on how to redact sensitive data using ABBYY FlexiCapture.
Hello. Today I am going to show you how to use ABBYY FlexiCapture software to redact sensitive information on your documents. The first thing I’m going to do is open up my document definition within the software. This is what we call sometimes a template. This is where we outline the fields that we want to capture off the document. I’m just going to simply open my first document definition here. You will see that we have our health insurance claim form, which obviously may have a lot of personal and private information that we do not want transported with the document as it moves downstream in our organization.
Our process today is going to capture information off of these forms, and we are going to block out the insured’s ID number. That’s possibly a private number that we don’t want other people to know. Also things like social security numbers, credit card numbers, are very common things that we would not want redacted.
All we do is we set up our form to extract these details. If you’re not sure how to do that, please go look at some of our other videos. We show some very common examples of how to set up a document definition. But for today’s purposes, we’re going to assume that’s already done. We’re going to go to our export settings. The reason why we’re going to say that is because during export, we want these fields to not be visible on the document.
Now, you’re going to see a couple things. You’re going to see us export the data to Excel. That will show us the details that we want. But on the actual document itself, as it moves downstream in our organization, we will not be able to see this number here, the insured’s ID number. We will actually make sure that is redacted and not visible to the end user as they review the document.
All we need to do is modify our export settings. We can kind of just read through this. Now, realize there are two different things we’re exporting. We’re exporting the data that we extracted off the form, and then we’re actually exporting a copy of the form itself. The data will go one place, and the image will go its own place. Most of the time the data will go into some sort of back end database that we’re using, and a copy of the image will get stored in an image repository. SharePoint or Filenet or other common repositories that are used throughout corporations today.
The first part is going to deal with our data. What we’re going to tell it is what format we want the document to be saved in. You can see we’re just going to keep it Excel, but you have a ton of different options here. We won’t go into all of them today. But you could feel free to request a trial from us, and we’d love to show you these. It’s going to ask you how you want the folder structure and file name to be used, and you can see the different options there. We’re just going to go ahead and leave it alone for today’s demo.
It’s going to ask us where we want the data to be saved. Then how do we name that saved data? Then also if that file already exists, what do we do? Do we add a suffix? Do we add to the end? Or do we rewrite the file? That is the data. Once again, every piece of extracted details off the form.
But when we actually want the form to be saved in its own copy, then that is where we have to click the Save Document Images button. You can see it highlights a couple things. We’re going to just save it to a data folder, but you could also save to its whole other place or location. We’re going to determine the format, and we’re going to go ahead and select PDF A for this one. Being A is the archivable format of PDFs. You see here there are tons of options that we can do when we select the image format. We’re going to leave it alone, but I did want to bring your attention to this screen to make sure that you know the different options that are available to your organization within the software.
The redaction piece of it though is the most important part for this demo. You’re going to see that we have this checkbox that says, “Redact sensitive data on images”. We’re simply going to select that. Then the Select Fields To Redact button is highlighted. We can move the fields from the left to right for the different fields that we want to be redacted on export. We’re simply going to say, “We want the insured’s ID number to be redacted”. But you can see here, you can select any other details. You can select as many of these fields as you want to be redacted. But we’re going to keep it one for today’s demo.
We’re going to go ahead and click Okay. Then we’re going to go ahead and hit Okay there, and also hit Okay. What we’re going to do is save our document definition. We’re going to publish it. Then we’re going to run a copy of this. What I’m going to do is drag and drop a CMS 1500, which is a copy of this form. A healthcare form. You’re going to see a couple of things here. The software’s in the process of processing the document. Now it is completed, and you’re going to see first what it extracted here on the left, versus a copy of the actual file here on the right.
If we zoom in a little bit here, you can see we captured the ID number. But over here in yellow, when we export this document we do not want to see that on the document. This document’s going to live further downstream, and we do not want users seeing that as they use this document for research.
You can see the different details here. What I’m going to do is export this. Now, I have an export folder set up. We’re going to export to this export folder. When this happens, we’re going to take a peek at the document. We’re going to see that it’s redacted. Then we’re going to take a peek at the data and see that we still have the data. We can do with that data whatever we would prefer.
I’m simply going to highlight and export, and I’ll open up our export folder here. You can see we already have the batch there. Once this is completed, we will take a peek at that.
Okay. Now that it’s completed, we will open up two things. One is, I’m going to open up the Excel spreadsheet, which is what we decided to export to. I’m going to go ahead and expand these columns. The important thing I want you to understand is that we still have access to the data. The insured’s ID number, we still have access to. But the other thing I want you to note is that on this document here, it is no longer available to us. Let me zoom out just a little bit. You can see here, the insured’s ID number is no longer visible to the end user. This gives us a way to control the document, and the private and sensitive information that we do not want known to those people that will be referencing this document in our companies later on.
Once again, it’s as simple as setting up export settings that give us the option to redact sensitive information. All of that is done from the document definition. If we go to document definition up here at the left, we can go to export settings. Once again, right here in the image export, is where we can redact that sensitive data on images.
I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope it gave you a good reference point on how to start with redaction. If we can be of any service to you, please feel free to contact us. Thank-you so much.