John Henry reports:
Lakeshore Mental Health Institute stopped admitting patients in 2012, but some of the clients’ records were still at the facility Tuesday.
Former Lakeshore employee Hilda Lindeman was walking through Lakeshore Park when she noticed old patients records were on the floor of an abandoned, easily accessible hospital building named Waterside.
She showed 10News how she found the records at the doorstep. The door to the building was wide open and its glass windows were broken.
“I knew instantly what it was from just working here,” said Lindeman, who worked at Lakeshore for 28 years.
The records contained social security data, names, case numbers, even birth dates. Lindeman said she did not notice the papers when she walked by the facility last week.
Read more on WBIR.
Update: The good folks over at HealthITSecurity.com obtained more information on this incident. A state spokesperson told them that the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services retrieved the records and identified the files as old backup Census reports:
While they did contain the patient-identifying information listed above, there was no medical data such as diagnoses or prescription information in the reports.
The incident also poses some questions for the state agency in terms of their reporting responsibilities. Read more on HealthITSecurity.com.