If you are a hospital, Doctor's private office, or a medical clinic, then chances are you are aware of HIPAA. HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This law means that any place that falls into any of the above mentioned business areas or any other type of medical facility that deals with patients or their information in any way is required to have a written policy which covers the security and privacy of their patients. This includes a policy for the destruction of any confidential patient information. This is why any Doctor or hospital in the Philadelphia region will have contracted the services of a Philadelphia document shredding company.
The HIPAA law does not specifically state what you have to do in order to ensure that your information is destroyed in a legally acceptable manner, but that any means which you use to do so are protected adequately to ensure that the patient information is not leaked. This means that you need to do business only with a shredding or document destruction company that is willing to sign what would essentially have to be an ironclad confidentiality agreement regarding the documents that you are having them destroy before they begin handling those confidential materials.
There are many different kinds of documents which fall under the jurisdiction of HIPAA. Consulting with a legal expert is the best way to ensure that you have understood fully all the different types of paperwork which falls under this act, and which you must protect and/or destroy when appropriate. This can include but is not limited to thinks like patient records, financial statements, contracts, health insurance information, and many other documents that can come up in the course of a patient's day to day dealings with a medical facility.
Using a third party company is almost always preferable to having some of your own people complete this task. The law includes that you should make provisions for contracting this service to a qualified company, and this should be done for many reasons. The principles of which are better protection of privacy, cost, and time. These companies have much better equipment to ensure that the documents you are destroying are destroyed. You also do not have to worry about confidentiality liability with one of your own people, as well as saving time and money by having a third party carry out the document destruction.
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://www.freebie-articles.com/images/rss.gif "XML Feed For RSS")
Category Rss Feed
Print This Article
Add To Favorites