Best Practices for the Secure Destruction of Personal Health Information

Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dr. Ann Cavoukian, is releasing a joint publication today in collaboration with Robert Johnson, Executive Director of the National Association for Information Destruction (NAID). The educational paper entitled, Get Rid of it Securely to Keep it Private: Best Practices for the Secure Destruction of Personal Health Information, is premiering at NAID’s 2009 Annual Conference in Toronto, Canada.

Commissioner Cavoukian will address the conference on the main points of the publication – namely, that when personal health information has reached the end of its life cycle, organizations must ensure that it be moved out and destroyed in a consistently secure and privacy-protective manner.
This publication was borne out of a particular Health Order (HO-006) which Commissioner Cavoukian issued this past summer regarding records containing personal health information being found scattered on the streets, in Ottawa, outside a medical centre housing a medical laboratory.
You can access the paper from the following link:  http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Resources/naids-print.pdf