My reasons focus on the potential disaster that can befall a victim of medical identity theft.  We have witnessed a deluge of recent disclosures relating to paper-based and electronic medical records losses and thefts.  What some of us may not realize is what that can mean for us as individuals, and what it means for others whose medical records are used inappropriately or illegally by others.  Members of the American Medical Records Association are involved, why not ARMA members and ARMA as an Association as well?

What are the potential results?  The results can affect us and others by compromising our financial identity – where medical identity thieves essentially hijack our information to obtain controlled substances – drugs, and can even lead to the inclusion of innacurate information within our own medical profiles.  Let’s say, for example, that someone with a different blood type hijacks your medical record.  What happens when a hospital relies on that incorrect information to provide you with a blood transfusion? What happens when that incorrect information leads medical professionals to treat you with a medication to which you are allergic?  Disaster can certainly ensue, and the risks include the potential for death as the result of treatments based on that false information.

As Amy Buttrell noted on the bankrate.com web site, “Financial identity theft can wound your wallet, but medical identity theft can kill you.” 

 Beyond the impact on each of us, medical records theft often allows the thieves to bilk our insurers, our government sponsored health care plans like Medicare out of millions and potentially billions of dollars.  Fraud in the health care area only serves to increase our costs and to increase our taxes as insurers and government agencies pay for services and for prescriptions that are not needed or used.

 What are your thoughts about the stake that Records and Information Management professionals have in protecting our medical records identities?  I look forward to your comments!

There are a few items that differentiate Global 360 from other firms.  First, the firm’s products span a wide range of audiences, from Imaging for Windows© for individual desk tops, through departmental and workgroup solutions, through to solutions that are designed to accommodate thousands of end-users, true enterprise-level systems.  Beyond the range of software solutions, Global 360 also provides outsourcing services to its customers.  Those outsourcing services focus on outsourced capture services and conversion services for paper-based, microfilm-based, and microfiche-based media.  To the best of my knowledge, Global 360 is the only large software provider that addresses both software and capture services for its clients. 

To answer the question about what I do for Global 360 is fairly easy within the context of the company’s offerings.  I am responsible for business development for our outsourcing services – translation: sales of those services.  I work with Global 360 customers and customers of other content management and process management providers as they seek to provide on-going outsourced capture services, backfile conversion services and/or media conversion services.  That role brings me into contact with many organizations that work to improve the efficiency in the way that they manage their records, and who seek to ensure that privacy rights of their employees and their customers or constituents is maintained.  I have had opportunities to be involved with medical/patient records conversion and capture work, opportunities to be involved with private sector records in sensitive areas like Human Resource records, and opportunities to work with those whose records include substantial personal identifying information in the government sector.  In each area, my firm works with clients whose volumes are high (millions of pages where digitization is needed), and whose needs include the protection of all of the personal identifying information contained within those records.

As a team member at Global 360, my background has served me well.  My prior employment and assignments have included everything from forms management, to micrographics systems, to records management, to enterprise content management and business process management.  That background has also included membership in a number of Associations like ARMA – where some might consider me to be over active, the ICRM, AIIM, and some specific industry-related groups. 

That’s a bit of a snapshot of both my company and of me from a business perspective.

There are a few who have taken an active roll in combating misinformation and who are now seeking to ensure that more complete information is available to those who might read IT oriented articles, management related articles or other “epistles” that are visible on the web. For lack of better phrasing, I refer to those who combat such misinformation as “first responders” for Records and Information Management (R.I.M.).

Below are a few examples to which I point that showing some of the information that we see on a daily basis, and the comments made by those who seek to promote our profession.

This first article focuses on IT organizations staffing efforts to meet the challenge of Records and Information Management. Hopefully, you will have a chance to read not only the article, but the subsequent comments:

Read the article here

One of the better responses came from Larry Medina, in a Computerworld blog.

Then in a subsequent set of two different columns and comments, you will see a discussion about the wisdom of getting rid of paper merely by scanning all of the documents that might be contained in a records center. I recommend that you test the links to track back from this column, to the original column, and then read through both the column and through the comments.

There have been a number of other examples over the past few months, but it’s good to see Records and Information Managers responding to articles and columns that appear. It would be terrific to see even more of us responding to what we read on the web.

I’d like to tip my hat to those who have drawn me into this area, include: Patrick Cunningham, CRM, Peter Kurilecz , CRM, CA and Larry Medina. These three professionals are doing great work on behalf of many of us today.