Hospitals are trashing thousands of personal health documents

* CANADIAN HOSPITALS THREW MORE THAN 2,500 DOCUMENTS CONTAINING SENSITIVE PATIENT INFORMATION IN RECYCLING BINS WITHOUT SHREDDING THEM  * THE IMPLEMENTATION OF ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS IN

THE US AND CANADA WAS MEANT TO PROTECT PATIENT PRIVACY  * BUT THE STUDY AUTHORS SAY THE RECORD-KEEPING TECHNOLOGY MAY HAVE 'MADE IT WORSE' * THE RESEARCHERS SUGGEST PAPER-SHREDDING

POLICIES, LESS PAPER WASTE AND CUSTODIAL TEAM TRAINING TO PREVENT FURTHER PRIVACY BREACHES By NATALIE RAHHAL FOR DAILYMAIL.COM Published: 11:00 EDT, 20 March 2018 | Updated: 11:02 EDT, 20

March 2018 Hospitals leave patient data vulnerable by simply throwing out thousands of pages of private documents instead of shredding them, a new study warns.  Researchers at the University

of Toronto and St Michael's Hospital retrieved 1,300 lbs of paper from recycling bins at five hospitals and found that more than 2,500 sheets contained private patient information. As

hospitals transition to digital record-keeping, patients and their advocates have become increasingly concerned that hackers could access their data.  But, as this study confirms, the

disposal of outdated paper records represents an even greater - but more easily avoided - threat to patients' privacy.     As cutting-edge as many medical treatments, technologies and

devices are, the transition to digital records has not been a smooth one for hospitals and the medical industry at large.  The records that doctors use to track their patients' health

contains a great deal of sensitive private information, which, in the US, is protected under the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).  The Ontario province of

Canada has a comparable law, called the Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA), enacted in 2004.  Information can include personal phone numbers, addresses and insurance

information that could be used to steal someone's identity. Perhaps more importantly, these documents include diagnoses that many may want to keep private.  'This gap [in

expectations and reality of privacy] needs to be addressed so that patients feel confident that their information is kept confidential. Otherwise, they may not say things freely to their

doctors,' says lead study author Dr Nancy Baxter.   During the proliferation of the internet and affordable technologies, concerns over the security of this information took on a new

importance as patients and providers worried that files could be accessed from locations outside hospitals.   In 2009, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health

(HITECH) Act was signed into law in the US.   You'd think that maybe this problem should be less of one than it was in the past, but...the piece of paper you got was the only result you

get, so you actually held onto that paper because it was precious Dr Nancy Baxter, lead study author  The legislation allocated a stimulus budget of more than $30 billion of taxpayers'

money to move health records from countless rows of filing cabinets and folders into digital form. Canada initiated a similar move to electronic patient files, but did so through a

coordinated effort between provincial and territorial governments, hospitals, and a specially-created non-profit entity called Infoway.  The idea - in both countries - was to make healthcare

systems function more efficiently and keep patient information safer, incentivizing hospitals to modernize with public funding.    Change came slowly, and painfully, as the record-keeping

systems implemented in hospitals and doctors' offices proved less than perfect, and quickly became outdated. What's more, facilities tended to hang on to their paper documents. 

Even now, doctors often use paper forms during patient appointments, and these have to be subsequently transferred to digital records.  'You'd think that maybe this problem should

be less of one than it was in the past, but, when I started training, we didn't have an electronic record, so the piece of paper you got was the only result you get, so you actually

held onto that paper because it was precious,' says Dr Baxter. Now, the information on those pieces of paper is nearly guaranteed to exist on a computer as well, and the easily

reproducible documents are often not properly disposed of by doctors, custodians or even patients themselves. 'So actually, this problem may have been made worse by the electronic

records,' Dr Baxter says.  In fact, Dr Baxter got inspired to do the study when she was working in a Minnesota hospital and saw a custodian rolling a giant bin of recycling down the

hall.  'Out of the corner of my eye, I could see stuff from patient charts from the floor,' she says.  Dr Baxter confronted the employee. She insisted the paper needed to be

shredded, he insisted it needed to go into the recycling dumpster. 'We ended up in a standoff, where I wouldn't let him move forward and had to call security to get him to take it

to shredding,' Dr Baxter says.   The interaction bolstered her long-held suspicion that these records were not being disposed of properly, at the Minnesota hospital or anywhere.   So Dr

Baxter and her team from the University of Toronto and the affiliated St Michael's Hospital went 'dumpster diving,' she says, and sifted through thousands of pounds of paper

that was recycled at five Toronto-area teaching hospitals between 2014 and 2016. A 500-sheet ream of paper weighs about five lbs, meaning they went through more than 310,000 documents.  Less

than one percent, of those documents contained sensitive information, but that still amounted to 2,687 sheets of paper that did leave patient information vulnerable. We ended up in a

standoff, where I wouldn't let him move forward and had to call security to get him to take it to shredding Dr Nancy Baxter, led study author  'The vast majority [of documents are]

shredded, but if you're dealing with 10,000 sheets of paper a day, and even just 0.1 percent gets put in the wrong place, it still ends up being a lot of personal information a

year,' Dr Baxter says.  Though she and her team only looked at documents from five hospitals, 'you will find this everywhere,' she says.  On the other hand, she says that

patients need not panic over what goes into the recycling.   'There are lots of reports of this information misused...but they don't usually do the dumpster diving that we

did,' says Dr Baxter.  The solutions that she offers are simple, but not easy.  In general, 'we create too much paper waste, so having everyone think twice before printing anything

- for both confidentiality and environmental reasons - could help,' Dr Baxter says.  If hospitals made it a policy to shred all paper that had even the slightest possibility of

containing sensitive material, the risk of confidentiality breeches could be minimized, but the financial cost would be likely be high.  Finally, she says that 'we need to empower

custodial staff.  'When people put things in the recycling, custodians don't feel empowered to make decisions about that, but they should be,' Dr Baxter says.