SUCCESS STORYIndustry• Government

Solution• OpenText™ Brava!™

State health agency reduces
record backlog
Department of Health increases responsiveness whilesafeguarding information with OpenText Brava!

Results
Secured safe and efficient
sharing of records with publicand partner agencies
Diminished paper storage andrelated costs
Improved turnaround time
for public disclosure requests,
reducing backlog by one month“Redaction is just too
important. OpenText
Brava! stood out
as the only productthat was designed
specifically forredaction.”
Configuration management architect

State Department of Healt

State health agency reduces record backlog

A State Department of Health (DOH) receives a high volume ofrequests for public records from citizens, the media and publicinterest groups. Among other records, requested information
may include:• Investigative records on compliance with licensees,
doctors, pharmacies and hospitals.
• Federal surveys conducted for ambulances, hospices and hospitals.
• Death certificates and birth records.
• Attorney-client privileged work.
• IT information related to infrastructure security.
To complicate the issue, agencies, such as the DOH, must provide
records while complying with state and federal privacy regulations,including the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and AccountabilityAct) Privacy Rule and state Privacy Act laws which require that they
redact certain types of information. Agencies can come under fire,and costly lawsuits, for failing to either disclose records or inadvertently
releasing exempt information.
The DOH receives about 1,500 records requests per month and eachrequest could require redacting anywhere from five to 1,500 pages.
When a request came in, employees would generally print out thedocument, use a black marker to block out confidential material, thencopy the marked up record before releasing it to ensure the text wasfully obscured. If they needed to send an electronic file, they would
then scan it back in and attach it to an email. Not only was manual
redaction time-consuming, it created a large amount of additional
paper, which added to the cost of handling and storing documents inaccordance with records retention policy.

In addition to these external requests, the DOH must share datawith other agencies. Employees remotely log in and the department
has data sharing agreements with other state agencies, thestate patrol and local health jurisdictions. Accessed documents
could contain confidential data, so the DOH needs to ensure
these records are redacted, even if they are not part of a public
disclosure request.
The DOH decided to implement electronic redaction to increase
efficiency and responsiveness while still safeguarding sensitive
information. After exploring different software products, the agency
selected OpenText™ Brava!™.
“What I noticed was that with a lot of other products, redaction
wasn’t the main feature or functionality of the software,” said aconfiguration management architect with the DOH. “Redaction is just
too important. Brava! stood out as the only product that was designed
specifically for redaction and that made a huge difference.”
Brava! supports virtually any document type, including PDF, TIFF,
Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Outlook
emails (MSG), and is available with OCR for TIFF and PDF.
Redactions can be applied by simply dragging a box aroundan area, selecting text, searching for text strings or via patternmatching (using regular expressions).
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The DOH does not usually work with standard forms and manyrecords contain handwritten notes, so employees typically rely on a“read and redact” process, which can be slow and tedious when done
manually with paper and marker. Now, they use Brava! functionality
to cover handwriting and select a word, name or other sensitive dataand have it simultaneously redacted through the entire report.

“[OpenText Brava!]
has made a huge,huge impact on
how we are able to
get work done.”
Configuration
management architect

State Department of HealthState health agency reduces record backlogBecause the PRA requires that agencies cite reasons for any
redactions, such as “Privacy Information,” the DOH uses Brava! codes
to cite the nature of the confidential material. These reason codes
appear on the finalized redaction boxes and can also be appended
as a reason log to the end of the document. Brava! creates fully
sanitized TIFF or PDF renditions of the original document for safe,
easy distribution.
For cross-departmental sharing, Brava! lets the agency create
redaction renditions of records that are safe for sharing online. The
configuration management architect described a recent scenario in
which research was being conducted to determine the number of outof-state patients undergoing a certain medical procedure in the state.
With Brava!, the DOH shared the number of patients but none of theirpersonal or health information.
In all, Brava! makes it easy for state agencies to safely release publicrecords, meet data sharing agreements and comply with records
retention policies.

“We have so many staff who are using Brava! because of the highvolume and the complexity,” said the DOH employee. “We’ve beenusing Brava! for about a year and a half and it has made a huge,huge impact on how we are able to get work done.” Initial return
reduced the DOH backlog by close to four weeks.
Following deployment, the DOH gave OpenText feedback on how
Brava! could be an even better fit for their business needs. OpenText
responded by adding additional reporting capabilities to the software.
“I really appreciate that OpenText listens to our needs and thenactually designs the additional functionality that we need,” said
the DOH employee. For rolling out the tool to DOH employees, shereferred to several well-designed learning tools. “The ‘HelpTool’ isincredibly useful,” she noted. “I took everything I used for training
right out of there.”

About OpenText
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visit opentext.com.
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