Personal health information is closely protected by the rules set out by HIPAA and various Business Associate Agreements. Having worked with healthcare organizations for years, California Recycles is entirely familiar with HIPAA and Business Associate Agreements, and we know that working with medical equipment is a great responsibility.
When dealing with equipment used in health care, one can’t be too careful in ensuring that the data is completely scrubbed. This is obviously an issue when dealing with computer hard disks and storage on tablets and other mobile devices, but photocopiers, fax machines, and specialized medical equipment often store private health information. These all must be treated with care to ensure complete data erasure.
HIPAA requires an extensive set of safeguards to ensure that patient data is completely secure. Because of this, we carefully log each step of the process to recycle medical equipment. We assess and inventory every piece of equipment. We treat anything that might store data with special care.
Part of our commitment as recyclers is to limit the amount of waste by reusing and refurbishing what we can. Hard drives that might be reused go through a multi-pass process to ensure a complete wipe of the data, and we physically destroy any storage medium that cannot be reused. We certify the destruction of data, so there’s no chance of any data leaking.