How to Safely Dispose of Medical Records

Your patients trust you and your staff to keep their medical records completely confidential. Unfortunately, many medical care facilities do not handle their records disposal the right way, and their patients lose their trust in their healthcare providers. It is estimated that 160,000 patients have had their confidential medical information breached since 2009 because the facility did not correctly dispose of the records.

Many doctors and medical facilities have turned to Shred America to avoid mishandling the disposal of medical records and to ensure that they are HIPAA compliant. However, remaining compliant requires more than just hiring our services. Your medical workplace should:

• Create and enforce a HIPAA compliant set of best practices with regards to medical records. Focus on both how records are kept within the office and how they should be disposed of when they are no longer relevant.
• Train all employees, existing and new, on these best practices.
• Keep up to date on any changes in HIPAA and other applicable legislation to ensure that your best practices remain up to date. Review and renew your best practices once annually with your legal team to be absolutely certain that you are in compliance at all times.

Shred America can help your medical facility to keep a secure disposal line. We encourage our medical clients to implement a shred-all policy, which requires hard copy and digital documents all be shredded. To make this easier, we provide locked consoles for materials that are due to be shredded, and we shred everything on site in our state of the art trucks. It is our business to help keep you completely compliant with secure destruction requirements, and we take that task and your trust seriously.

Stop endangering your patients’ information and trust; call us today to set up a regular shredding schedule for your medical facility.