Regulatory compliance is a huge concern for companies in many industries, but the cost of failing in compliance efforts can be an even higher concern. Penalties, fines, loss of business, loss of client confidence, and even outright theft of confidential financial information can quickly add up and take a heavy toll on your business.

Increasingly, document management strategies are found at the center of compliance efforts. Since so many of these regulations are targeted at ensuring the security and privacy of personal information, having the proper strategy in place is crucial. Implementing a responsible approach to document management not only makes compliance easier, but also ensures that companies are adequately protecting their customers’ information.

Look no further than the healthcare industry to get an idea of the adverse effects of a poor document management strategy. According to the Notifiable Data Breaches Quarterly Statistics Report from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), the largest source of reported data breaches was the private health service provider sector (health sector) accounting for 20% of breaches that occurred from April to June of 2018.

About 50% of all breaches included personal financial information, and almost all included contact information such as email addresses, phone numbers, and home address.

Recently, hackers breached the Singapore government’s health database with a “deliberate, targeted and well-planned” cyber attack that lasted almost a week, accessing the data of about 1.5 million patients, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

According to a survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute in 2016, half of all healthcare organizations had little or no confidence in their ability to detect the full scope of patient data loss or theft, and half were unsure if they could sufficiently prevent or detect unauthorized patient data access or theft.

The threat of a data breach and its subsequent fallout are a driving force in the growth of the medical document management market. Research firm HTF expects the market to grow at a CAGR of 15.5 percent from 2016 to 2023, reaching $US789.9 million.

Secure Document Management

Document management solutions are one of the primary ways businesses can address these security and compliance issues, while also giving organizations more visibility into where documents are, who is using them, and whether or not they’ve been compromised.

Effective document management can help lock down documents and protect all the data flowing into an organization by combining both paper and digital document streams.

By digitizing paper documents as soon as they arrive at a facility, organizations can better manage and track information. Also, this allows organizations to reduce the possibility that the paper documents will be lost, misfiled or compromised.

This process can provide significant savings when it comes to administrative costs because documents can be centrally stored and accessed without having to physically move them to other departments and store them in a file cabinet. Most document management solutions also provide functionality that can allow companies to see who has viewed or signed these digitized documents.

This approach to digital document management also makes it easier and less costly to access and retrieve documents at a later time. There’s no more searching through full filing cabinets, cluttered desk drawers, or bulging boxes. In addition, documents are more secure because businesses can internally track which employees have viewed the documents using sign-in credentials. This is an important feature, as the number of internal data breaches continue to rise.

In fact, document access can be limited or controlled internally more easily when using a digital document management approach. Applying permissions to the documents can ensure information security and make it easier for external auditors to confirm you are following regulations or best practices.

In some industries, allowing certain employees to view particular types of content can lead to violations or penalties. Permission-based access greatly curtails those problems and helps ensure customer or patient privacy.

Advanced document management also makes it easier to manage the metadata associated with documents and files. This not only makes it easier to search for and locate files, but also can be used to classify data for regulatory and legal purposes. Accurate meta tagging – which can be automated using document scanning and management solutions – can greatly relieve the information gathering burden of an audit and help organizations gauge their own compliance internally.

While there is a cost to deploying new document management technology, the costs of a failed compliance audit or a data breach are even higher. According to Ponemon’s research from 2017, the average cost of a data breach is now $US3.86 billion, with an average cost per record of $148. Half of healthcare CISOs admit having suffered a security breach in the last 24 months, according to new research that not only highlights the poor state of information security in healthcare organisations, but warns attackers are have gained the upper hand using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

Just a third of organisations responding to a recent member survey – conducted by the Health Informatics Society Australia (HISA) within its Cybersecurity Community of Practice – said they performed a cybersecurity risk assessment at least annually, while only 65% had a formal business or governance plan that included managing cybersecurity issues.
Don’t be left vulnerable. By implementing a solid document management process, your company can both ethically and responsibly track the path and lifecycle of your documents, increase the security of who can access those documents, and decrease the chances of a data breach or a hefty non-compliant fine.

With deep roots in education, Tim is passionate about impacting positive change in both people and processes.  From coach’s clipboard and curriculum writing to product management and strategic marketing planning, Tim thrives on plying his creative problem solving skills and out-of-the-box thinking every day and on every project.  Tim has been with OPEX Corporation, a global leader in document scanning solutions, since 2008. He currently serves as their Director of Marketing.