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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