COVID-19 has accelerated the push toward digital business transformation for most businesses. In response Healthcare Providers and Payors are creating new or modified business models that increase efficiencies, cut costs and support digitalization initiatives, but also impacts existing processes and present new compliance risks for legal and compliance leaders. Challenges around transformation are compounded by the need to create deliverables ensuring that compliance and legal requirements will be met.
General counsel and its team are tasked with advancing organizational priorities and instituting the considerable change management necessary to support compliance and risk management priorities. Concurrently, legal and compliance leaders need to improve their own functional management by streamlining and automating workflows within their teams to allow their attorneys and legal staff to focus on higher value work. Forming an information governance strategy with IT is a best practice because it creates a more proactive data management life cycle position. Increasingly within Healthcare organizations, IT is working together with legal and compliance stakeholders, where shared responsibility for information governance, data privacy and security issues is prevalent. IT can effectively shepherd this process, but, legal and compliance must first identify requirements, which are driven by applicable laws and regulations. From there, the parties can develop and implement policies to address risk.
Legal and Compliance teams within Healthcare are using M365 primarily to support 3 areas of risk: eDiscovery, Data Protection and Records Management. In doing so, they are working with IT and others to understand the capabilities of the toolset and designing new workflows that account for M365 Technology. Enterprise stakeholders should anticipate both the positive potential improvements that the opportunity presents and the risks that come with new technology innovations. Greater collaboration is needed across IT, Legal and Compliance teams to build support for enterprise-wide investments in technology that address complex business demand while managing risks.
Major enterprises today are engaged in hundreds if not thousands of e-discovery matters each year. Software that supports the ability to effectively conduct and manage discovery activities not only saves time and cost, but also enables enterprises to have higher levels of confidence over risk control and compliance. End-to-end and SaaS-based solutions like Office 365 have accelerated adoption by bringing e-discovery inside an organization which saves cost and time.
Microsoft Advanced eDiscovery offers a native and integrated solution that streamlines and speeds up the document review process by identifying redundant information with features like Near-duplicates detection and Email Thread analysis. The Relevance feature applies predictive coding technology to identify relevant documents. Advanced eDiscovery learns from your tagging decisions on sample documents and applies statistical and self-learning techniques to calculate the relevance of each document in the data set. This enables you to focus on key documents, make quick yet informed decisions on case strategy, cull data, and prioritize review.
Advanced eDiscovery builds on the existing set of eDiscovery capabilities in Office 365, while allowing an in-house legal team to perform further Early Case Assessment or complete a case to end-to-end. For example, it provides a Search feature in the Security & Compliance Center to perform an initial search of all the content sources in your organization to identify and collect the data that may be relevant to a specific legal case. This offers the ability to perform analysis on that data by applying the text analytics, machine learning, and the Relevance/predictive coding capabilities of Advanced eDiscovery. This can help an organization quickly process thousands of email messages, documents, and other kinds of data to find those items that are most likely relevant to a specific case.
Complementary to a company’s eDiscovery strategy, healthcare organizations are increasingly concerned about the protection of personal and sensitive information due to changes in regulations (GDPR, CCPA. etc) and increased enforcement and awareness of Data Privacy laws. The use of sensitivity labels to identify and manage sensitive content; and the use of Microsoft Information Protection to understand the data landscape allow for effective policies to be put in place, and control the retention and deletion of these data types.
Healthcare Providers and Payors fast adopters are proactively planning and budgeting for compliance requirements that focus on user convenience throughout the compliance journey. Beginning with taking inventory of the data protection risks to managing the complexities of implementing controls, staying current with regulations and certifications, and reporting to auditors. Improvement actions are helping centralize compliance activities. These improvement actions provide recommended guidance that’s intended to help you align with data protection regulations and standards. Improvement actions can be assigned to users in your organization to perform. eDiscovery practices can also be more proactive by implementing several components found within information governance plans, as well as anticipating increased global privacy and regulatory compliance requirements.
Join this 1-hour session to benchmark with peers and hear from subject-matter experts on how healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations can utilize M365 native tools to support eDiscovery, Information Governance, and Records Management programs. Uncover common challenges, most impactful use cases for the healthcare industry, and key considerations when forming a wider compliance strategy for M365.
During this webinar, expect to learn:
- How M365 is changing the way healthcare and pharma companies think about eDiscovery and information governance
- What M365 tools legal and compliance professionals can utilize to support their wider initiatives
- How to ensure compliance and legal requirements are met in context of M365, and why people and process are critical to this strategy
- What resources and investments Microsoft can offer for a successful transition
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