Inquiry: Security Policies & Stateless Processing for Medical Document Extraction (Azure Content Understanding)

Dear Azure Support Team,

I am writing to seek technical clarification regarding the implementation of Azure Content Understanding for a medical project based in Australia. Our clients, who are senior medical specialists, have extremely high requirements for data privacy and legal compliance.

In addition to the requirements below, our use case involves extracting structured patient information from predefined document templates (e.g., referral letters, medical forms). The system is expected to accurately identify and extract specific fields such as patient name, ID, Medicare number, and other clinical metadata.

1. Patient Identifiable Data Redaction (PII/PHI)

We must ensure that all Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI)—such as patient names, Medicare numbers, and IDs—are automatically identified and redacted during the scanning process.

Does Azure Content Understanding support both:

Automated field-level extraction from predefined templates, and

Automated redaction of PII/PHI fields for Australian medical documents?

2. Zero Data Leakage

Australian regulations prohibit senior specialists from allowing sensitive patient data to be stored or exposed on external cloud systems.

Can you confirm whether Azure Content Understanding ensures that no customer data is stored or retained (i.e., operates in a stateless manner) and that there is no data leakage?

3. Regional Compliance

To comply with local regulations, all data processing must occur within the Australia East region.

Can you confirm that Azure Content Understanding can be fully deployed and operated within this region?

We would appreciate it if you could provide official documentation or a Data Protection Addendum (DPA) that covers stateless processing, no-data-retention configurations, and compliance for handling medical data in Australia.

Thank you for your professional support.

Best regards,

Loc