Tag: HIPAA

Saving Trees and Securing Data

While reviewing our bills today, I noticed our Certificate of Destruction receipt from our shredding service. It now includes a nice little notice of how many trees we’ve saved by our shredding efforts.

shredding receipt
36.4 trees saved!

The receipt shows 36.4 trees saved so far this year. I’m not exactly sure how they calculate it, but I’m guessing it has something to do with the weight and/or volume of paper that we present to them for onsite shredding.

The primary purpose of our shredding efforts is to protect private data from falling into the wrong hands. Shredding helps us comply with HIPAA and PHI rules and keeps our data private.

Our internal policies state that everything we print and even documents that we receive be shredded unless we are mailing them. As an extra precaution, all shredding takes place at our facility with our staff supervising the process.

That’s good for clients…and good for trees too, it seems!

 

HIPAA Certified

HIPAA

HIPAA Certified. You might know what this is if you are in the medical and/or insurance field. It stands for The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It is a collection of rules that help govern the privacy of patient data and information.

Even if HIPAA doesn’t affect your organization directly, it does in a round-about way if you use LetterStream… mainly because we train our staff on HIPAA rules and follow them internally within our organization. The policies and procedures that we’ve put in place to protect private health information actually protect all our clients’ jobs.

So if you’re a law firm that sends class action lawsuit material or a pool cleaner who sends monthly statements, your information is guarded by the same tools and resources that we use for hospitals, medical offices and third-party administrators.

At the time of this blog post, 100% of our full-time employees and a portion of our part-time employees have passed HIPAA certification!