As a retiring physician, the last thing you should worry about is proper disposal of the medical records and documents of patients. The information contained in the medical documents is usually private and sensitive data on patients. If the information falls in the wrong hands can cause potential confidentiality breaches and even identity theft. Identify theft has increased in the last few years. Don’t let this happen to your patients by properly disposing of your medical documents.
As a health professional and doctor, you have a legal obligation to ensure patient information is secure, even when they are being disposed of. The United States Department of Health & Human Services require that proper disposal methods are utilized to get rid of medical documents.
Sensitive Patient Information
Sensitive patient information is usually referred to protected health information or PHI, mentioned in the HIPAA regulations. Protected health information is considered any information that can identify an individual relating to the past, present, or future health status of the individual. The information can be created, collected, transmitted or maintained by a HIPAA-covered business that relates to the healthcare, payment for medical services, or use in the healthcare operations. Sensitive information can include the patient’s name, geographical identifiers such as zip codes, dates, phone numbers, fax numbers, email addresses, social security numbers, medical record numbers, health insurance numbers, account numbers, license numbers, biometric identifiers, etc. It is important to ensure that any document that contains these types of patient information is destroyed appropriately.
How to Dispose of Medical Documents Properly
Using a document shredding service is one of the best ways to ensure that medical records and documents are disposed of properly. The shredding processes used make it impossible to piece information back together once it is shredded. As part of My Retired Doctor, we offer our retiring physicians the peace of mind of appropriately disposing of their patient medical documents. We specialize in properly disposing your old medical documents to ensure no confidentiality breaches. Our document shredding service is HIPAA compliant.
Get in Touch with us!
If you are getting ready to retire, let us help you! We offer various services for you and document shredding is one of them. Give us a call at 877-328-2343 today to learn more about our services and see how we can help you! Don’t spend your time worrying about what to do with all those old medical documents. Let us help you today!