Atlantis Casino Resort Spa and Offsite Data Depot Sign Agreement for Document Management Services

Posted on Jul 14, 2010 in Records Management News

Tues­day, July 13, 2010 at 08:00 AM

Move Saves Atlantis Approx­i­mately $6K/Month

CARSON CITY, Nev.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Until recently, Reno’s Atlantis Casino Resort Spa leased secure ware­house space for stor­ing admin­is­tra­tive doc­u­ments and gam­ing receipts. When it came time to destroy out­dated doc­u­ments, they hired a shred­ding ser­vice to come in about once a month to per­form secure doc­u­ment destruc­tion. In an ongo­ing effort to save costs and increase effi­ciency, the casino looked at other options and services.

“These days, every busi­ness is tak­ing a harder look at their bot­tom line. Like the Atlantis, com­pa­nies from many indus­tries are start­ing to fig­ure out that they can save a sig­nif­i­cant amount of money while actu­ally improv­ing their records man­age­ment by out­sourc­ing to a pro­fes­sional records cen­ter like Offsite.”

Effec­tive in May, Atlantis signed an agree­ment with Off­site Data Depot in Car­son City for secure doc­u­ment stor­age, elec­tronic inven­tory and doc­u­ment destruction.

Ron Rowan, Atlantis Casino Resort Spa CFO, said, “Tran­si­tion­ing to Off­site has resulted in greater doc­u­ment secu­rity, con­ve­nience for our team and lower expense for our company.”

Gerd Pop­pinga, Offsite’s Direc­tor of Oper­a­tions, added, “We inven­tory and track every record elec­tron­i­cally to guar­an­tee an audit trail. We arranged all labor and trans­porta­tion for the doc­u­ment move, and worked with Atlantis’ staff to ensure an accu­rate inventory.”

Brian Olson, co-owner of Off­site, men­tioned, “These days, every busi­ness is tak­ing a harder look at their bot­tom line. Like the Atlantis, com­pa­nies from many indus­tries are start­ing to fig­ure out that they can save a sig­nif­i­cant amount of money while actu­ally improv­ing their records man­age­ment by out­sourc­ing to a pro­fes­sional records cen­ter like Offsite.”

About Atlantis Casino Resort Spa

Atlantis Casino Resort Spa, a hotel casino in Reno, Nev., fea­tures 61,000 square feet of casino space, 1,000 guest rooms, eight food out­lets, two espresso and pas­try bars, a 30,000-square-foot health spa and salon with year-round pool, two retail out­lets, an 8,000-square-foot fam­ily enter­tain­ment cen­ter, and over 5,000 square feet of ban­quet, con­ven­tion and meet­ing space.

In gam­ing, Atlantis fea­tures nearly 1,450 slot machines, 38 table games includ­ing black­jack, craps, roulette and more, race and sports book­ing, a 24-hour keno lounge, and a poker room. For more infor­ma­tion: www.AtlantisCasino.com.

About Off­site Data Depot

Head­quar­tered in Car­son City, Off­site Data Depot offers Nevada busi­nesses secure records stor­age and man­age­ment ser­vices, includ­ing cer­ti­fied doc­u­ment destruc­tion, doc­u­ment imag­ing and host­ing, online com­puter back­ups and email fil­ter­ing. Cus­tomers include city and state gov­ern­ment agen­cies, gam­ing facil­i­ties, law enforce­ment ser­vices, title and insur­ance com­pa­nies, physi­cians and health­care facil­i­ties. Visit www.offsitedatadepot.com for more information.

Con­tacts

PRowrite Pub­lic Rela­tions
Chris­tel K. Hall, APR CBC
775–267-9232 (Edi­to­r­ial)
or
Off­site Data Depot
Brian Olson, 775–888-9933

Read More: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100712006713/en/Atlantis-Casino-Resort-Spa-Offsite-Data-Depot

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County improperly disposed of documents, told no one

Posted on Jul 14, 2010 in Records Management News

10,600 peo­ple pos­si­bly affected; com­mis­sion­ers opt to ‘wait and see if there is any response from clients’

By Josh Sweigart, Staff Writer
12:58 AM Sun­day, June 13, 2010
HAMILTON — When a mound of Mid­dle­town city doc­u­ments con­tain­ing people’s pri­vate infor­ma­tion was found in a pub­lic Dump­ster this spring, it wasn’t the first — or largest — such secu­rity breach by a local gov­ern­ment.
An inves­ti­ga­tion by this news­pa­per has found that But­ler County’s Depart­ment of Job and Fam­ily Ser­vices learned in 2008 that con­fi­den­tial records from that agency were being “peri­od­i­cally” improp­erly dis­posed of in a pub­lic bin.
An inter­nal analy­sis by the agency found that 10,600 peo­ple could have been affected.
This is the num­ber of peo­ple who used the JFS office at 4122 Tonya Trail in Fair­field Twp., where the doc­u­ments orig­i­nated. They included case notes and ver­i­fi­ca­tion forms deal­ing with the Ohio Works First, food stamps, Med­ic­aid and child care pro­grams.
Though the records were sup­posed to be shred­ded using a doc­u­ment dis­posal com­pany, county offi­cials found that office had been sim­ply throw­ing the records in a recy­cling bin.
That’s where they were found by a mem­ber of the pub­lic on July 18, 2008.
The county took action to make sure the records were dis­posed of prop­erly, and con­sid­ered noti­fy­ing the peo­ple who may have had infor­ma­tion com­pro­mised.
Offi­cials drafted a let­ter sug­gest­ing peo­ple could use a free Inter­net ser­vice to guard against iden­tity theft.
But they never sent the notice out.
Instead, they decided to “wait and see if there is any response from clients,” accord­ing to inter­nal memos.
Two years later, those clients still have no knowl­edge their infor­ma­tion could have been com­pro­mised.
“They should have told us from the very begin­ning,” said Christina Cruz, who used the JFS office dur­ing that time.
County held back on response to a records breach
When Jerome Kearns first saw the pile of con­fi­den­tial records from his office in a Dump­ster by But­ler Tech, he thought they were stolen.
It was July 18, 2008. County records lay out in detail what hap­pened next: what county offi­cials did — and didn’t — do.
There were piles of papers — files from But­ler County Job and Fam­ily Ser­vices, where Kearns is assis­tant direc­tor, and from LifeS­pan, the county engineer’s office, Chil­dren Ser­vices, and But­ler County Child Sup­port Enforce­ment Agency.
Some of the records con­tained con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion, such as case notes and eli­gi­bil­ity ver­i­fi­ca­tions for food stamps, Ohio Works First, sub­si­dized child care and Med­ic­aid pro­grams.
Kearns esti­mates there were about 10 60-gallon trash bags of records. He called co-worker Adam Jones because Jones had a pickup truck.
“They weren’t going to fit in my Elantra,” Kearns said. “There was a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of records there.”
The records had been found by a mem­ber of the pub­lic.
“Some mem­ber of the com­mu­nity (was) throw­ing their stuff in there, and picked one up and thought they were impor­tant,” Kearns said.
Kearns took the records back to where they pre­sum­ably came from, the JFS office at 4122 Tonya Trail, off Lib­erty Fair­field Road in Fair­field Twp.
Doc­u­ments pitched ‘peri­od­i­cally’
It didn’t take long to solve the mys­tery.
The next day, Kearns asked Kim Gay, man­ager of that office, where the bins were that she used for con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion. In other county offices, spe­cial bins were peri­od­i­cally picked up by the com­pany Royal Doc­u­ment Destruc­tion for shred­ding.
The Fair­field Twp. office, which had been open since Jan­u­ary 2007, had no such bins. Staffers there had been throw­ing records in the recy­cling bins. Believ­ing that there was no con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion involved, a worker for But­ler County Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices, which han­dles recy­cling for county offices, “had dumped these bins at com­mu­nity sites peri­od­i­cally over the last six months,” Kearns wrote later.
County offi­cials went into action

Read more here: http://www.oxfordpress.com/news/oxford-news/county-improperly-disposed-of-documents-told-no-one-759626.html

Indiana to Store Abandoned Medical Records

Posted on Jul 14, 2010 in Records Management News

GRM Doc­u­ment Stor­age Blog

At least one state, Indi­ana, is tak­ing some much needed pre­cau­tions to help fight iden­tity theft. They are tak­ing it upon them­selves to store aban­doned med­ical records.

“We noticed that when doc­tors offices and clin­ics closed there were still these huge resources, banker boxes and file cab­i­nets full of med­ical records with very sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion and before there was no statute about what to do with that. So when peo­ple would call and say what do we do with these records we really didn’t have a good answer,” Greg Zoeller, Indi­ana Attor­ney General.

The econ­omy and con­sol­i­da­tion has forced many med­ical offices to close. Many more are con­vert­ing to elec­tronic records from paper. When paper records are no longer needed, the seem­ingly obvi­ous solu­tion is to have a pro­fes­sional ven­dor shred them, pro­vid­ing proof of their destruc­tion. It seems that all too often, at least in Indi­ana, this isn’t hap­pen­ing. Instead, offices are lit­er­ally dump­ing files or leav­ing them in aban­doned offices. Not only does this expose the patients and employ­ees to secu­rity risks, it may expose the prin­ci­pals of the med­ical firm to tremen­dous lia­bil­ity. A sim­ple phone call to a shred­ding com­pany would pre­vent a slew of prob­lems. Think of cer­ti­fied shred­ding as a very inex­pen­sive insur­ance policy.

The Indi­ana Attorney’s Gen­eral office has secured a large ware­house to store the papers. It’s prob­a­ble that out­sourc­ing to a local records cen­ter would save the tax­pay­ers money and would offer plenty of extra space while the num­bers of aban­doned records grows, but I have to give kudos to the State of Indi­ana for tak­ing steps to solve a seri­ous problem.

The prob­lem isn’t unique to Indi­ana or to the med­ical indus­try. GRM Doc­u­ment Management’s San Fran­cisco office works the Con­ser­va­tion and Liq­ui­da­tion Office, an agency of the State of Cal­i­for­nia that stores records for insol­vent insur­ance companies.

See more at

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=24674240&gid=1170287&trk=EML_anet_qa_ttle-dDhOon0JumNFomgJt7dBpSBA

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