“The only paper records in the hospital at the time of the disaster
were the paper lite charts that were on the units with current
inpatients and a few that were in the HIM department waiting
to be scanned into the system.” —Tracy Clark
“Since the tornado we have had very few records turned in
to us, and most all of them have been the old radiology films,”
Clark says.
St. John’s has access to its historical master patient index, so it
knows what records it should have.
“Once we get the inventory of records from our vendor we
should be able to ascertain which records were damaged or
lost,” Clark says. “But at this time we feel there are very few that
were a total loss. I don’t know how you would rebuild a database
unless you had a back-up off site somewhere, which thankfully
we did.”
St. John’s Mercy Corporate IT department is responsible for
maintaining the hospital’s information systems in a tornado-
proof data center off site. Employees from the corporate office
arrived after the disaster to set up computers and scanners so
HIM personnel could start scanning documents that were ei-
ther found or were being created for new patients after the tor-
nado, according to Clark.
Privacy Worries
One lingering worry in the aftermath of the disaster is that scat-
tered records could lead to a breach of patient information. A
“If someone is worried about identity
theft they can change all their bank-
ing and credit accounts and also check
their credit report for activity they did
not [originate],” Clark advises. “If they
receive any bills from medical provid-
ers that they know they did not incur,
they need to report this immediately to
their insurance carrier or CMS if they
have Medicare. Medical billing fraud is
a huge problem and costs our country
billions of dollars a year.”
A question for St. John’s was whether
the Office for Civil Rights, which en-
forces the HIPAA privacy rule, would
consider the scattered records a breach
of patient information.
“I contacted our corporate compli-
ance officer for Mercy the morning
after the tornado,” Clark says. “When
she contacted the regional OCR office
they said they totally understood since
it was a natural disaster. Our corporate
compliance office has been updating
OCR as to our efforts in retrieving and
restoring our records.”
Many of the known missing materials
are x-ray films, which can be cleaned
and restored once they are found, ac-
