Smartbox.ai Lightens DSAR Load For Local Council Staff
Councils up and down the UK are managing vast amounts of data on a daily basis, and that is just the basics – the everyday data.
When the complications associated with Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) are thrown into the mix, the amount of time pulled away from a council employee’s core role is staggering. It is no wonder that more councils than ever before are turning to Smartbox.ai for help with their datasets, explains Smartbox.ai’s sales manager Ben Pickles.
Setting the scene
Councils are receiving SARs from two key areas – firstly employees – whether disgruntled employees looking to retrieve data, or current employees looking to find out information about local residents for a variety of reasons, but mainly – around 70 per cent of requests – for social and healthcare reasons.
Not only is that a challenge in terms of the volume of data they have to sift through, but everything currently has to be done manually and every single file has to be converted to a PDF. Doing that on 5,000 files, let alone 20,000-plus files is painful to say the least, and will take multiple hours to complete. And that is just the first step.
In every DSAR case, somebody will have to identify personal data, and manually go through every document to redact it. Some documents themselves could be duplicated. It is a literal mountain of paperwork. Plus, the information is highly sensitive and very personal – very similar to the NHS – and in theory these SARs are about patients – whether this is adult care, child care or social housing related issues.
Key challenges
These include how to differentiate between third-party data which needs to be redacted, but also identifying the healthcare workers, social workers, nurses, doctors or clinicians are that have been working on a particular case – these names don’t need to be redacted. But first they have to be identified, and that is the first challenge; differentiating between the two sets of data.
Secondly, there is the challenge over whether there is any health care contamination in the documentation; has someone else’s medical or social care records been accidentally merged into another – how long would it take to manually identify this issue?
Finally, and this is particularly pertinent when it comes to mental health and child care services – how does a person going through a document identify whether there is something contained in that particular document that is going to potentially harm somebody else or have an effect on their mental health?
This is where Smartbox.ai can help
By choosing Smartbox.ai technology, we can take all this pain away and make the process smooth and hassle-free.
Smartbox.ai technology can automatically convert all files into a PDF, identify all the duplication in documents and email threads, and get rid of this unwanted information with a single click.
But it is our use of ‘regular expressions’ and ‘dictionaries’ that can really make a difference.
Regular Expressions are a sequence of letters, numbers and hypens – for example; a medical record – if more than one number is mentioned in a DSAR then it is a potential problem, but Smartbox.ai can identify any potential problem areas and help the user to fix it.
Dictionaries have multiple uses – for example names – which can be separated into two lists, those that can be used, and unusable third-party names. Dictionaries also use risk indicators to highlight certain trigger words in a dataset – such as abuse, rape or drugs, and make it easy for the user to identify and navigate to where is something contained within documents that can potentially harm/affect someone further down the line.
Particularly in the case of childcare services – when a child is being placed in care – you know they haven’t completely lost contact with Mum or Dad, but they have clearly had problems in the past. Perhaps in some notes, comments that Mum, Dad, Brother, Sister or even Granny/Grandad have made to the care worker can be quite damaging. Smartbox.ai will help users find that potential problem and solve it on the spot.
Councils, as well as other public sector organisations such as prisons and hospitals, are using these Dictionaries to protect the mental well-being of their own employees when reviewing particularly sensitive and horrific content.
Every council we speak to is concerned with the mental health of their employees, and we are signing new councils all the time when they realise the benefits Smartbox.ai technology can offer. To learn more about how Smartbox.ai supports local government authorities, please visit https://smartbox.lislex.xyz/dsar-local-government/