subject: Hippa Shredding Services [print this page] Whenever you work in the health care industry in any way, there are a large pile of laws that you need to learn about and follow that do not often affect people working in other industries. Just one of the most basic of these, but one of the most essential to follow closely, is known as HIPPA.
HIPPA is an acronym which stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It is designed to help protect the private information that clients and patients are going to have to provide to their medical offices in order to get treatment. The basic aim of the act is that it requires all companies in the industry, from doctors' offices to hospitals, to clinics, to have written policies which document how they dispose of documents which contain confidential information belonging to their clients. This means that for a medical facility doing business in the New Jersey area, the best thing to do would be to have a written policy which clearly states that all patient information will be handed over at the appropriate time to a New Jersey shredding service to ensure that it is destroyed and kept private as according to the law.
HIPPA does allow for some flexibility in that it doesn't actually require that you have to use a certain type of shredding service, or have more specific guidelines to follow, simply that you must have a written policy in place that ensures that all privacy statues are going to be met. This is something that it is virtually impossible to do internally, which is why the vast majority of HIPPA policies in order to be compliant with the act will have provisions that explain how all documents will be handled by a professional shredding service.
Almost every piece of paperwork which is part of a patient's record at your facility will in some way fall under HIPPA, which is why most documents do need to be eventually destroyed. This includes anything which contains any banking or insurance information belonging to the patients on it, as well as many other types of patients records which might include confidential medical information.
When you hire a professional company to take care of shredding your documents, you make sure that you are following the law, and protecting your patients. These companies have the proper equipment and the experience to make sure that all documents are totally destroyed in such a fashion that they can never be reconstructed.
