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Sitting quietly in a Frontier Boulevard office park, Outcomes Health Information Services employs almost 200 people in Stanford, mostly Registered Nurses (RN) and Licensed Practical Nurses (LPN), and paper is at the center of their business.

Among many other services, the company reviews medical records for some of the nation’s largest health insurance companies to ensure billing accuracy. “We look for overcoding and undercoding,” Rita Goodwin, Senior Executive Vice President for Auditing said. “Overcoding would be if a patient came in for a cold and got billed for an MRI,” she explained. Undercoding would be the opposite case.

The company employs field agents that work in all 50 states visiting medical facilities and scanning records that are sent to Stanford. As one would expect, this paper-intensive process generates a lot of waste, but because of the sensitive nature of the records, extra care must be taken to protect it. “All of it is covered by HIPAA,” said Goodwin, referring to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Outcomes is serious about security; just to sit in the waiting room, separated from the work spaces by a locked door, you need to sign a four page agreement promising not to reveal any of the information you may observe. HIPAA charges those who create and maintain records to protect the information therein; at Outcomes that means under lock and key except when they are in the hands of one of the record examiners, and they are kept under lock and key in rolling storage bins until they are destroyed.

Docubit, a Lancaster based company that serves 300 businesses in Kentucky, is responsible for the destruction. Docubit’s Jason Gaffney, who presented Outcomes with an award for being one of his company’s top three recyclers, said that Outcomes personnel keep physical control of all documents until the moment of their destruction.

“We do all of our document destruction onsite,” Gaffney said, which reduces the chance that information will be exposed or lost before they are destroyed.

And ‘destroy’ is the word they use. Docubit, whose motto is “Anyone can shred paper, we destroy documents,” regularly sends mobile document destruction teams to the Stanford office to deal with the mountains of paper produced there.

Gaffney quantified the amount by putting it in terms easy to visualize. By recycling all of their documents, Outcomes conserved 578 trees, 12,920 gallons of oil, 102 cubic yards of landfill space, 238,000 gallons of water and 136,000 kilowatts of energy.

Gaffney said his estimates are based on a recognized Environmental Protection Agency conversion standard and represent true conservation.

Some of the destroyed documents probably make their way back to Lincoln County in the form of tissue paper products. Gaffney said paper mills in Kentucky and Tennessee find the destroyed documents are perfect for making paper towels, tissues and toilet paper.

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