University Health Associates has confirmed that several medical billing documents were mistakenly dropped at the Monongalia County, WV, Community Recycling Center by a waste hauling truck from Allied Waste.
An unknown number of other documents left at the same site were shredded shortly after their arrival there, said Bill Case, WVU Health Sciences Center spokesman.
Confirmation comes about one week after The Dominion Post received several calls that medical records had been spotted at the recycling center.
The documents were part of a large load of papers Allied Waste picked up July 13 from UHA's business office in Morgantown for transport to Fairmont for destruction. The pickup was part of a long-standing contract between UHA and Allied that specified the paperwork contained health information protected under federal law and must be secured at all times until destruction.
Case said the documents were the type patients normally fill out when being screened before treatment.
"Apparently, some of the papers remained in the truck after the drop-off in Fairmont," Case said. "When the same truck was used to transport cardboard boxes from another location to the Morgantown site, a number of the UHA papers were deposited with the cardboard."
Case said records from all WVU medical offices are locked in large plastic garbage bins to keep them out of sight and secure.
Jeff Harvey, Allied Waste Services of Fairmont general manager, was not available for comment.
The staff of We Shred, a recycling company located at the recycling site, identified the papers as possibly having private information, and shredded the bulk of them immediately. Four or five sample sheets were preserved and provided to UHA this week to allow officials to trace their origin.
"To my recollection, that's exactly what happened," said Jeff Edwards, We Shred co-owner. "The guys found them. These trucks come in, and they'll have like 15,000 pounds of cardboard in them. Guys here were about to bale the cardboard when they found the records."
UHA plans to discuss this incident with Allied Waste and will re-examine practices to assure their patients' private information is protected at all times, Case said.
"Although no medical records were found, the billing documents included patient names and the services they were billed for," he said. "We appreciate the action taken by the staff and management of We Shred to protect our patients' privacy."
For the past two years, UHA, along with West Virginia University Hospitals, has been developing a large-scale electronic record-keeping system that will substantially reduce dependence on paper records and reduce the possibility of these sorts of incidents, Case said. Dominion Post