Paper shredders are essential for almost any business to have on hand, but this is especially the case for medical facilities. Document shredders help maintain the safety of your employees, patients, and business through safe information disposal. Explore this and more reasons why shredding is important in medical offices.
Required To Meet HIPAA Standards
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a law that helps regulate and protect health information to keep patients safe. The HIPAA guidelines help prevent data breaches and the spread or use of personal information outside an approved medical setting. Document and multi-media shredders are integral to maintaining these guidelines through the proper disposal of confidential information. Hospitals and other medical facilities and offices must have a high-security shredder to dispose of documents after a certain period.
Safely Manage Patient and Employees Records
As noted above, HIPAA laws require shredding to safely dispose of patient and employee records in a medical facility. Your department will need to safeguard some of these documents for specific periods, such as employee records for employer or employee reference. However, you may need to shred some medical records immediately. A facility will need to swiftly shred any documents that reflect misinformation or contain errors in their reporting. When a facility upgrades from physical to digital documentation, shredding the old paper files as soon as possible can help prevent identity theft or security breaches.
Prevents Medical ID Theft
Paper shredders aren’t the only necessary shredder for a medical facility to have on hand. High-security multi-media shredders are critical for shredding items like hard drives and ID badges. If you were to dispose of an old medical ID improperly, it could end up in the wrong hands. The safest way to dispose of old medical ID cards is to utilize a multi-media shredder or disintegrator. High-security shredders reduce IDs to tiny pieces that won’t allow any individual to restore them for nefarious purposes.
We hope these several reasons help explain why shredding is important in medical offices. If you have yet to install a document or multi-media shredder in your medical facility, consider browsing our stock of high security shredders here at Capital Shredder Corp. We carry various shredder models to best fit your facility’s needs and secure your information.
