Exploring The Benefits Of Shredding Services

Even if your outpatient medical office keeps a lot of information within a secured computer system, you will still have documents with patient information as part of your daily care operations. Because these documents contain sensitive data, they cannot be thrown away like other papers and need to be shredded.  

Especially if the office has a large patient load, keeping up with shredding the documents can become a monumental feat. Instead of trying to take care of it yourself, consider a couple of the benefits of hiring a paper shredding service to deal with your outpatient medical office's patient documents.

1. Frees Up the Time Your Office Staff Would Need to Spend Sorting, Processing, and Shredding the Documents 

One benefit of having a shredding service take care of your patients' paperwork is that it frees up the time your office staff would need to do it on-site. As part of the process, they would need to sort the papers as well as remove any paperclips, staples, and other bindings before they can push them through the shredder.

However, when you use a shredding service, your staff only needs to put the papers into the receptacles that the service provides. They will take care of sorting and removing bindings, which allows your staff to focus their attention on other tasks around the office.

2. Ensures That the Privacy of Your Patients Is Maintained

Another benefit of hiring a service to shred your medical office's papers is that they will ensure that the privacy of your patients is well maintained. Since these documents contain sensitive information about your patients, they need to be destroyed according to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). If you dispose of the documents improperly, your medical office would face hefty fines. However, the shredding service can ensure that the documents are stored, transported, and shredded in accordance with privacy laws.

When you hire a service to take care of the disposal and shredding of important patient documents, you free up the time your staff would otherwise need to spend sorting, processing, and shredding them. The service also makes sure that the documents are destroyed in a way that is fully in compliance with HIPAA laws. For more information, contact a business that offers paper shredding services in your area to learn more about the service they offer and how they can help your medical office.