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.

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