Lloyd's Register and HSE enlist Ohalo to anonymize 600,000 safety incident records

Saving lives.

You don’t ever really think about it, but each time an accident happens at work, that gets recorded. In aggregate, there is so much that we can learn from these records. From ladder falls to much larger incidents, cross-referencing how accidents and fatalities occur is key to mitigating future tragedies.

When Lloyd’s Register and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) approached us about a unique problem they had in anonymising safety incidents records data, we first wondered why they hadn’t just done this already by hand. Well, it turned out that the task was not small. They had as their goal not just a handful of records, but over 600,000 records, and that was just in the first go–it would have taken over a decade to do such a task. So what they were really looking for is something to do what a human does but in days instead of years. And with their help, we were able to accomplish this task on the one off basis and now on an ongoing basis as new projects and data come in.

When we started Ohalo I never thought one of the outcomes of our work would be to contribute to getting people home safe and sound to their families. Data privacy at scale is a reality for HSE and we are very pleased to be a small part of that.