subject: Document Shredding Under Hippa [print this page] Any New Jersey Shredding service likely has a contract or two which they have gained because of HIPPA. HIPPA is a national regulation which governs the protection of patient information from companies that do business in the medical or health care industry. The acronym stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
Privacy laws are taken very seriously in this country, and HIPPA is one of the steps the government has taken to help to protect privacy. This law covers any facility or office which deals with patients as a health care provider. This encompasses hospitals and private doctor's clinics, but also chiropractors, dentists, physical therapy and rehabilitation centers, and more. If a business has ever referred to someone in their practice as a "patient", there is a good chance that they're covered under HIPPA.
This law doesn't have a set of rules that you have to follow in terms of how you protect your patient's private information. What it does instead, is state that your office must have a policy to do so. The specifics are that you must have a written policy which outlines how private information will be destroyed.
Essentially, any document which contains the private information of a patient has to be shredded and disposed of so that it cannot be accessed by anyone else. This is achieved through the use of a professional shredding service. A written set of guidelines which are created under HIPPA will have a long standing contract with a shredding service in place so that there can be no misunderstanding that all patient documents are being shredded professionally on a regular schedule.
There are a lot of different things which can constitute private information on the part of a patient. The most obvious is anything which contains any information in regards to their health, test results, or treatment information, but it does go beyond this. Any billing statements or invoices which contain private banking information of a patient would certainly fall under this act as well. Insurance specifics are also covered and must be destroyed as well.
A good rule when creating your HIPPA policy is to be better safe than sorry. If there is no reason for a copy of a document to be kept within your organization then it is simply safer to have it destroyed. That way, there is no chance of you every being held liable for not properly destroying patient information.
