Legal, finance, and healthcare companies deal with huge volumes of data and complex document workflows. Not only does this put a burden on IT systems, the sensitive nature of the personal information these companies process requires strict attention to security and compliance protocols.
How are large organizations overcoming these challenges? And what should legal, finance, and healthcare companies be considering as they automate complex workflows?
CTO at Pdftools
We recently sat down with Andrea Bačić-Schäfer, CTO at Pdftools, a global leader in providing innovative software solutions and developer components for PDF and PDF/A products. In this Q&A, Andrea uncovers the challenges these industries face, and reveals how large organizations are reliably automating complex document workflows to ensure document integrity and the security of sensitive information. Plus, get a glimpse into the future of PDF AI.
What are some of the most common ways PDFs are used in the legal, finance, and healthcare industries?
All of these industries rely on PDFs because of their standardization, security, versatility, legal acceptance, integration with other systems (like Electronic Health Records), and their ability to preserve document quality in very compressed file sizes. But every industry has their specific use cases. Here are some common examples:
Finance Industry
- Publishing financial statements and quarterly reports for clients
- Issuing invoices and receipts
- Distributing and completing tax documents and credit agreements
- Extracting data from bank statements or financial reports
Legal Industry
- Compiling and sharing case files and briefs without unintended modifications
- Finalizing contracts or other legal agreements with digital signatures
- Streamlining the eDiscovery process
- Redacting sensitive information in legal documents before sharing
Health Industry
- Sharing patient records and test results to maintain data integrity
- Extracting patient data from PDF medical records
- Assisting with medical billing and insurance claims
- Providing consent forms for procedures and treatments
PDFs are used in lots of other ways too, but those are some of the common ones.
What are the bigger challenges that legal, finance, and healthcare companies face when it comes to processing PDFs?
Like any big organization, automated PDF processing tools have to be integrated with existing enterprise systems, like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, Document Management Systems (DMS), Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, company archives, and so on.
The number of PDFs that pass through these systems can also be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions per year. So these systems need to be robust, reliable, and have good error checking and troubleshooting mechanisms in place to make sure everything runs smoothly and nothing is missed.
But the biggest challenge these particular industries face is ensuring the security and privacy of sensitive information within the PDFs. These industries are tightly regulated, have strict compliance requirements, and handle personally identifying information related to people’s health, financial, and legal status. So these documents need industry-standard encryption and protocols. Password protection, and controllable redaction and editing permission settings are other crucial tasks to get right in these industries.
How do automated PDF tools handle privacy concerns and ensure that processing complies with industry-specific regulations, such as GDPR, HIPAA, or SOX?
Some of the bigger things are around the use of advanced encryption for data protection, robust redaction tools to permanently remove sensitive data, and role-based document access controls. They also have robust security measures to prevent data breaches.
These tools also maintain audit trails, which log all interactions and changes to a document, and help ensure transparency and compliance for regulations like SOX. For regulations like GDPR, there are options that let you control where data is stored.
Other features like digital signatures can also add a layer of verification, which is really important for legal documents or patient consent.
Automated PDF tools can also be integrated with other compliance tools to ensure real-time adherence to industry-specific regulations like HIPAA or SOX.
How do you ensure that the automation process maintains the integrity of the original PDF document, and doesn’t lead to a loss of critical data from the PDFs?
There are several layers of checks and protocols to protect PDF integrity in automated workflows. I’ll mention some we use at Pdftools.
The only way to make sure that a document is not modified is by applying a digital signature to it. So our tools offer automated document signing as a part of the workflow that the customer is using.
Converting documents to PDF is complex because input can come from almost any type of document format, so when converting we have to make some assumptions. For example, if the font is not embedded in the source document, we’ll make an assumption based on the information that we have, and embed the closest font that we can find.
If we’re optimizing PDFs, we’re not only compressing parts of it, like images, but also modifying the metadata in a way that removes redundancies and duplications. Or if a customer chooses to do so, the entire metadata of a PDF may be removed as well.
Control of all of this is in the customer’s hands through workflow configuration. All of the assumptions we make are reported as warnings. This way the customer knows at any moment what has happened, and they can decide if they’re okay with such assumptions or not.
What are the key features to look for in a PDF automation tool tailored for these sectors?
I’ve already touched on a few above, but let me highlight some of the most common and complex features we see throughout these industries.
Archiving is one of the most crucial needs for many companies. We have customers who are responsible for archiving documents for decades, like documents related to property rights, and sometimes for hundreds of years, in the case of city archives. For these customers, it’s essential that the documents will still be readable in the distant future. Many companies have discovered that documents they created back at the end of the 1990’s using Office 95 are no longer supported by Microsoft, and our conversion to PDF/A solution is an answer to this common problem.
Another key feature is automating the conversion of all incoming emails and their attachments to a PDF/A format for long-term storage. Health insurance companies, for example, receive emails with attachments of various types, and those attached documents often have nested documents in a variety of formats. Accurately converting all of these nested documents is technically challenging, but it’s something our products offer that companies rely on.
In the health industry, extracting specific details from a document is another common need, for example, extracting the medication a patient has been prescribed. There are a variety of document types where a hospital needs to do this, and we help automate processes to extract the needed data and provide it in a desired output (such as JSON) for further processing.
Enriching documents for specific workflows is another task these industries often require, such as adding spreadsheets to invoices, metadata to a document, or automatic stamping with text, image, or barcode.
Some other noteworthy features include:
- Digital Signature Integration: To ensure document authenticity
- Batch Processing: Efficient handling of a huge throughput of PDFs
- Audit Trails: A warning system for all conversion details that might need control
- OCR Capabilities: To ensure all text is searchable
- Flexible Integration: Seamless compatibility with existing systems
- Customizable Workflows: So processes fit your unique organizational needs
Apart from specific product features, you also want to get to know the company you’re partnering with. You are building a document workflow that will process a huge amount of highly sensitive information. These are not simple out-of-the box automation processes that you switch on and everyone lives happily ever after. Updates will be needed, maintenance will be required, and troubleshooting will be necessary. This is unlikely to be an implement-and-forget relationship. So you need a PDF partner who will be there for you, and work closely with you when you need them.
Can you provide an example of a successful PDF automation process that Pdftools has implemented in the legal, finance, or healthcare industry?
One interesting example was with Suva, a large insurance company in Switzerland. They process between 100,000 and half a million document pages a day, but they had a big problem: they were receiving PDF files from different source systems, which came with different PDF standards.
So to help them meet their long-term archiving requirements, we implemented a central conversion solution that converts all PDF formats into the PDF/A-2u standard. And because of the large number of documents, they required very fast, efficient processing with transparent error information to quickly identify and troubleshoot errors if they arise.
Now Suva has an automated central PDF conversion solution that’s improved the efficiency and accuracy of their document management. And they can count on all of their documents being correctly converted and in regulatory compliance.
How do you see AI or other emerging trends or innovations affecting PDF automation over the next five years?
We’re already seeing AI integrated into the PDF space, and this will for sure accelerate in the upcoming years.
At Pdftools, we’re already using AI to better comprehend PDF content to improve document analysis and categorization based on their actual content.
Things like enhanced data extraction will enable more accurate extraction from complex documents, even if layouts or formats change. Predictive analytics will also anticipate user needs and automate routine tasks before they’re even requested.
AI-driven anomaly detection will also enhance security by identifying unauthorized access or breaches faster than traditional methods. And automated redaction may help identify and redact sensitive information, which will improve compliance and privacy.
At the same time, the speed of change is still difficult for most of us to grasp. So these predictions could turn out to be wildly understated. Who knows, maybe we’re reviewing PDFs in a collaborative VR—dare I say “meta”—space. At Pdftools, we’re not yet pushing into the metaverse, but we do have some very practical, highly efficient uses of AI that our customers have already started to see and can count on seeing more of in the near future.
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