Arlington Cemetery Still Uses Index Cards for Recordkeeping

Posted on Aug 26, 2010 in Records Management News

“It’s 2010,” Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) said, when informed Arling­ton National Ceme­tery was still using 3X5 cards to keep track of who was buried where. “We’re using 3X5 cards for the peo­ple who are the national heroes of this coun­try,” Brown said. “Here it is 2010. We’ve got all this tech­nol­ogy, and we’re still deal­ing in 3X5 cards. It’s a joke.” The inci­dent occurred at the July 29, 2010, hear­ing on the well-documented prob­lems at the ceme­tery in front of Home­land Secu­rity and Gov­ern­men­tal Affairs Committee’s Con­tract­ing Over­sight Subcommittee.

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HSC records lost in June fire

Posted on Aug 26, 2010 in Records Management News

The exact cause of the fire is unde­ter­mined, but the inves­ti­ga­tion is focus­ing on the roof top air con­di­tioner where the fire may have begun and spread rapidly. Tem­per­a­tures are believed to have reached well over 2,000 degrees, accord­ing to the Albu­querque Fire Depart­ment.
Most of the con­tents were
destroyed in the build­ing, as the fire con­tin­ued through­out the day, fill­ing the streets with heavy smoke.
“In order to deter­mine the scope of the dam­age, UNM HSC acti­vated its emer­gency oper­a­tions com­mand (EOC) to address imme­di­ate patient care and staff needs and to com­plete an inven­tory of the records lost in the fire,” Porto said.

The fire con­tin­ued to smol­der until July 3, until it reignited and burned for another 26 hours. As a result, fire­fight­ers soaked with water the remain­ing con­tents to pre­vent fur­ther damage.

The ware­house stored patient med­ical records from the UNM HSC cre­ated before 2005, when the hos­pi­tals switched to dig­i­tal record stor­age.
HSC also began scan­ning old records into a dig­i­tal for­mat five years ago, Porto said, but it is still unknown how much of the lost records were scanned.

Paul Roth, UNM exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent for Health Sci­ences, said the inci­dent is unfor­tu­nate but could have been worse.
“We are deeply sad­dened by this unfor­tu­nate event,” he said in a press release. “Had we not ded­i­cated our­selves to switch­ing to a totally dig­i­tal record sys­tem five years ago, this could have been far worse.”

The ware­house, owned by a Texas land­lord, was leased by a pri­vate con­trac­tor under con­tract with the HSC and UNMH to store records.
The dam­aged and destroyed records at the ware­house site were secured imme­di­ately after the fire was ini­tially extin­guished and have been secure ever since, an HSC state­ment said. Dam­aged records will be dis­posed of accord­ing to the require­ments set forth in the Health Insur­ance Porta­bil­ity and Account­abil­ity Act of 1996.

HSC has devel­oped pro­ce­dures to inform peo­ple who request copies of past med­ical records that the records were destroyed in the fire and give them a doc­u­ment cer­ti­fy­ing that fact.

Read more: http://www.dailylobo.com/index.php/article/2010/08/hsc_records_lost_in_june_fire

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Find Confidential Files at the Dump

Posted on Aug 21, 2010 in Records Management News

Posted by Ron Arden on August 19th, 2010
Posted in: Blog, Data breach, Privacy

Most of the data breaches I read about in the news are from com­puter sys­tems. Either some­one lost a lap­top with patient records or social secu­rity num­bers, or some­one hacked into a server with credit card num­bers. With all the high tech ways of doing things, we may lose sight of the low tech meth­ods of steal­ing information.

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, dump­ster div­ing is the prac­tice of sift­ing through com­mer­cial or res­i­den­tial trash to find items that have been dis­carded by their own­ers, but which may be use­ful to the dump­ster diver. Do you remem­ber the famous scene in the movie Ani­mal House, where Bluto and D-Day go sift­ing through the trash to find the answers to a test every­one is tak­ing? Think about peo­ple doing that look­ing for patient records, social secu­rity num­bers and the like.

A recent arti­cle in the Boston Globe talks about patient infor­ma­tion from four (4) Mass­a­chu­setts hos­pi­tals wind­ing up at a city dump. These were paper doc­u­ments and noth­ing was shred­ded. By law, med­ical records and doc­u­ments with per­son­ally iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion (PII) must be destroyed to pro­tect per­sonal pri­vacy. Send­ing them to the city dump clearly vio­lates the law. Some­one wasn’t thinking.

This sounds like a chain of cus­tody prob­lem that attor­neys and oth­ers in the legal and law enforce­ment pro­fes­sions face. Think about all the peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions that touch a patient’s con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion. An insur­ance com­pany has social secu­rity num­bers and patient pro­ce­dures, so they can pay claims. The doc­tors and nurses involved in care have infor­ma­tion on diag­no­sis and treat­ments. If a phar­macy is involved, they know about pre­scrip­tions. Admis­sions and billing peo­ple know all about patient records so they can admit patients and bill insur­ance com­pa­nies. Some of the peo­ple may be inter­nal to a hos­pi­tal or med­ical prac­tice and many may be out­side ser­vice providers. The num­ber of peo­ple who can access your and my med­ical records is very large. And how they han­dle that infor­ma­tion is important.

Much of this infor­ma­tion is elec­tronic, but the vast major­ity also exists on paper. Between fill­ing out admis­sions forms in a wait­ing room to receiv­ing an EOB (expla­na­tion of ben­e­fits) form in the mail, your infor­ma­tion is every­where. At least at home, you and I can make sure we shred any papers with this infor­ma­tion, but when it comes to our providers, we have to trust that they are tak­ing the same precautions.

It is impor­tant to lock down your com­puter sys­tems against hack­ers and insider threats, but we need to make sure that the old fash­ioned ways of steal­ing con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion are put out of busi­ness. Using a $50 shred­der could save a lot of grief. As I always say to my kids, “Take a minute to think before you act”.

Read more: http://www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=175122399&gid=52423&type=member&item=27623434&articleURL=http://edocumentsciences.com/find-confidential-files-at-the-dump&urlhash=jxgV&goback=.gde_52423_member_27623434

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Google CEO Exposes Dark Side of Social Networking

Posted on Aug 19, 2010 in Records Management News

Google CEO Eric Schmidt puts the con­cept of online pri­vacy in the spot­light once again
By Tony Bradley, PC World

August 18, 2010 09:51 AM ET

Google CEO Eric Schmidt fears that too much infor­ma­tion is shared online, and pre­dicts that peo­ple will one day change their name and rein­vent them­selves in order to escape their dig­i­tal past. That point of view might be extreme, but it is true that social net­work­ing has forced us to more closely exam­ine and rede­fine the con­cepts of pri­vacy and identity.

There are many excit­ing ben­e­fits to the evo­lu­tion of the Web and the rise of social net­work­ing. Face­book and Twit­ter have enabled peo­ple to recon­nect with friends and fam­ily, and pro­vide a plat­form for shar­ing infor­ma­tion and stay­ing in touch. The real-time aspect of social net­work sta­tus updates has also trans­formed online search and break­ing news.

The Real Impact of Video on Your Net­work: View now
The prob­lem is that social net­work­ing also pro­vides a very pow­er­ful tool for embar­rass­ing your­self or ruin­ing your rep­u­ta­tion on a global and vir­tu­ally eter­nal scale. Once you put it online, it is shared around the world in sec­onds, and can still be recalled after decades.

You’re Hired

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It is not uncom­mon now for the job appli­ca­tion process to include shar­ing your social net­work­ing account infor­ma­tion. Tech savvy employ­ers want to be able to check out your Face­book pro­file and your tweet his­tory on Twitter.

What you say and how you act online says a lot about you. Exam­in­ing your online per­sona gives employ­ers a raw and unfil­tered glimpse at who you really are, and is a much more effec­tive tool for screen­ing poten­tial employ­ees than the psy­cho­log­i­cal per­son­al­ity or apti­tude tests relied on in years gone by.

You’re Fired

There is a long and grow­ing list of sto­ries of peo­ple los­ing their job as a result of Face­book sta­tus updates or Twit­ter tweets. It is gen­er­ally a bad idea to bad mouth your boss or your job on a social net­work­ing site, or to post pics and sta­tus updates about how much fun you’re hav­ing at the beach after you called in sick.

One poor soul learned this les­son the hard way–possibly cost­ing him a job at Cisco before he even started. Employ­ers are watch­ing, so let­ting the world know that you hate the job you have been offered is a quick way to get that offer rescinded.

What’s Your (Friend’s) Credit Score?

It’s all about who you know. In this case, who you know could make or break whether or not you can get a loan. Some banks are using ser­vices like Rapleaf to scan your social net­work and iden­tify con­tacts con­nected with you that also do busi­ness with the finan­cial insti­tu­tion. Based on the finan­cial sta­bil­ity and credit his­tory of your social net­work con­nec­tions, the bank can make an assump­tion about what sort of credit risk you might be.

Till Death Do Us Part

It seems fair to assume that your spouse would be a Face­book friend, and a part of your Twit­ter­verse. Why not? Love is grand, and you want to share every­thing with your partner…until you don’t. If the rela­tion­ship goes south, you may want to unfriend your ex and be care­ful what you say online.

A Time Mag­a­zine arti­cle explains “Lawyers, how­ever, love these sites, which can be evi­den­tiary gold mines. Did your husband’s new girl­friend Twit­ter about get­ting a piece of jew­elry? The court might regard that as mar­i­tal assets being dis­bursed to a third party. Did your wife tell the court she’s inca­pable of get­ting a job? Then your lawyer should ask why she’s pur­su­ing job inter­views through LinkedIn.”

Read more here:

http://www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=174641877&gid=1854392&type=news&item=174641877&articleURL=http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/081810-google-ceo-exposes-dark-side.html%3Fsource%3Dnww_rss&urlhash=gIpk&goback=.gde_1854392_news_174641877

Cornerstone Records Management Announces Acquisition of Rochester Data Storage Center

Posted on Aug 18, 2010 in Records Management News

Sub­mit­ted by klewis@prismintl.org on August 16, 2010 — 7:47am
Colum­bia, MD – August 12, 2010 –

Cor­ner­stone Records Man­age­ment, LLC announced today that it has com­pleted the acqui­si­tion of the assets of Rochester, NY, based Rochester Data Stor­age Cen­ter, Inc.

“With a sig­nif­i­cant pres­ence in the Rochester mar­ket and addi­tional cus­tomers across the greater Upstate New York area, Rochester Data rep­re­sents a great fit with our exist­ing pres­ence in the state of New York,” said Steven Sis­ney, Pres­i­dent and CEO of Cor­ner­stone. “Rochester Data offers a full suite of record and infor­ma­tion man­age­ment ser­vices includ­ing the stor­age of hard copy records, both mobile and plant based shred­ding ser­vices, as well as pro­vid­ing elec­tronic media vaulting”.

“Cus­tomers of Rochester Data will be able to ben­e­fit from enhanced cus­tomer ser­vice due to our larger foot­print, and they will have access to a broader array of prod­uct offer­ings,” explained Sis­ney. “We will be able to pro­vide these cus­tomers full solu­tions to their records and infor­ma­tion man­age­ment needs in a flex­i­ble and respon­sive man­ner.” Rochester Data will become part of Cornerstone’s East­ern Divi­sion which is head­quar­tered in King of Prus­sia, PA

The acqui­si­tion of Rochester Data rep­re­sents the eighth acqui­si­tion com­pleted by Cor­ner­stone since June 2008, and reflects Cornerstone’s phi­los­o­phy of grow­ing both organ­i­cally and through acquisition.

Cor­ner­stone is con­tin­u­ing to focus on rapidly grow­ing its busi­ness in the South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, Den­ver, North­east and Mid-Atlantic markets.

About Cor­ner­stone Records Management

Cor­ner­stone Records Man­age­ment LLC is a full solu­tion RIM part­ner, oper­at­ing in select geo­gra­phies, that helps our cus­tomers achieve their oper­at­ing and com­pli­ance objec­tives in a flex­i­ble and respon­sive man­ner. Serv­ing a broad cus­tomer base, Cor­ner­stone pro­vides a wide range of ser­vices includ­ing the stor­age and man­age­ment of hard copy records, both plant based and mobile doc­u­ment destruc­tion ser­vices, elec­tronic media vault­ing, and dig­i­tal imag­ing. Cor­ner­stone does busi­ness as LA Records Man­age­ment in the South­ern Cal­i­for­nia area, Cor­ner­stone Records Man­age­ment in the Den­ver mar­ket, and Nova Records Man­age­ment in the North­east and Mid-Atlantic mar­kets. Please visit www.cornerstone-rm.com for addi­tional information.

About Ster­ling Partners

Ster­ling Part­ners is a lead­ing pri­vate equity firm with over 25 years of expe­ri­ence part­ner­ing with entre­pre­neurs to build market-leading busi­nesses and gen­er­ate supe­rior returns. With approx­i­mately $4 bil­lion of assets under man­age­ment, Ster­ling invests growth cap­i­tal in indus­tries with pos­i­tive, long-term trends and pro­vides ongo­ing sup­port to man­age­ment through a ded­i­cated team of indus­try vet­er­ans, oper­a­tors, strat­egy experts and human cap­i­tal pro­fes­sion­als. Ster­ling Part­ners is a leader in edu­ca­tion, health­care and busi­ness ser­vices and is co-headquartered in Chicago and Bal­ti­more. For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.sterlingpartners.com.

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