A doctor for Accelerated Urgent Care said that a contractor painting a room full of medical records removed the files and threw them away in a dumpster.
The City of Bakersfield has removed the dumpster that contained hundreds of medical records from the parking lot of Bakersfield College.
23ABC found the medical records dumped inside a public recycling bin Thursday afternoon.
The records had photo copies of drivers licenses and Social Security numbers.
The records say they are from the Concentra Urgent Care that used to be on Stockdale Highway.
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23ABC asked Erickson why there wasn’t an employee watching over the files while the room was being painted, and Erickson said, “That’s an impossible request.”
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23ABC spoke with Dr. W. Tom Fogarty, Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President of Concentra who said that they sold the practice in February 2013 to a local occupational medical provider.
Fogarty said they confirmed that they had transferred all of the records and the records were the local occupational medical provider’s responsibility.When asked about the identity of the local provider, Ross McLerran who is the media relations person for Humana, said that due to contractual obligations he cannot release that name.
CA: Accelerated Urgent Care doctor claims contractor took medical records from room
Read more on 23ABC.
I wonder if Concentra Urgent Care gave their patients the opportunity to take their own records or to opt-out of having them sent to another provider. That boxes of records seemingly just sat in a room for over a year suggests that the patients did not transfer over, for the most part, or that the practice did not need the records. So what will HHS say about data retention like this? A lot of health care entities hang on to data – sometimes with good argument for doing so. But when does it become just a foolish risk with no real benefit to the patients or the covered entity?
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