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Solutions for ALL Businesses

Records Management in the Workplace

11/18/2022

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Why is Records Management Important in the Workplace?

Technology allows us easy access to an abundance of information at the push of a button, and we should expect nothing less from modern record information systems. The need for effective records management continues to grow as workplace processes evolve and the creation of endless information increases. With a strong system in place, you can easily locate vital records that hold significant administrative, historical, and legal value to your business.

An effective document management system is not a guaranteed success with the implementation of modern technology; you must work for it. That means researching today’s cutting-edge technology, understanding your own business needs, and finding the perfect match. For example, do you need web-based software? How about scanning capabilities to easily search for your documents? Once you understand your business-specific needs and conduct proper training on your new system, you will experience the benefits of effective records management. ​

Top 4 Benefits of Effective Records Management

A comprehensive records information management (RIM) program crafted with your unique business needs will set your workplace up for success. Here are a few benefits you can expect with implementing a strong system: ​

1. Improve Company Workflow

Having a universal location for important documents allows employees to be more efficient with their time. With advanced indexing RIM technology, information will be classified and categorized in a way that allows authorized individuals to easily access records without spending excess time stifling through documents. Well-structured records management improves workflow by creating a more seamless record retrieval process and ultimately improving productivity. ​

2. Effectively Retrieve and Dispose of Records

Using a cloud-based repository for your records allows you to streamline your data processes by safely disposing of unnecessary documents allowing for quick retrieval of unencumbered data. Being able to easily access and share records allows your business to make informed decisions more efficiently. 

3. Minimize Risks and Protect Data

It is crucial for businesses with records containing confidential information and personnel files to safeguard this information properly. An effective RIM program will preserve integrity by ensuring access only to authorized users and automating proper record destruction. This will make certain records follow the correct protocol to minimize your organization's potential penalties and liabilities. ​

4. Improve Compliance

As laws and regulations such as HIPAA, FACTA, and HITECH become increasingly stringent, it is crucial for businesses to abide by these mandates. An effective records management system will track the life cycle of your documents to ensure you are following regulatory compliance. Records management plays an important role in avoiding legal action and expensive penalties.

Get Organized with R4 Records Management Services

While technology can be complex, it’s most effective when it makes our lives easier and allows us to do our jobs with better results. When selecting a records management provider, it’s important to ensure you will receive the most modern, cutting-edge, and efficient technology. Every company is unique, and your technology and records management needs will be different from other organizations. 

At R4 services, we will find the right document management solution for your company by setting your priorities, objectives, efficiencies, and results at the forefront. Contact us today to learn more about our records management services!
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Recycling Shredded Paper

10/26/2022

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Recycling Shredded Paper

As concerns over the environment have increased over the past few years, businesses and residential communities have started more “going green” recycling campaigns to do their part. Just separate the paper from the plastics from the metals and throw them in a bin on the curb. However, it is not as easy as it may seem, especially when it comes to shredded paper. Here is everything you need to know about recycling shredded paper.

Can You Recycle Shredded Paper?

Shredded paper is still paper and therefore it can be recycled. However, where regular paper is fairly simple, shredded paper is complex. That’s right, if you take that sheet of looseleaf and tear it into bits, it suddenly becomes a hassle. Many recycling services refuse to accept shredded paper since it can ball up and clog  the filters and machinery at sorting plants. In addition, shredding paper weakens the strength of the natural fibers, making it highly ineffective at being turned into new paper. We often think recycling paper is the easiest way to save the planet, since it has a 68% recycling rate, but it only makes a difference if it’s done correctly. ​

How to Properly Recycle Shredded Paper

So this begs the question: what should we do with our shredded paper? You presumably don’t want your identity stolen by a dumpster diver and your credit card statements are nobody’s business but your own. Well, one answer is fairly simple, but not completely obvious: Reduce your amount of shredding. If you just want to cover up one line from your bank statement, use a permanent marker to black it out and recycle the paper like you normally do. However, this may not always be possible, especially with large documents.  
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If you find yourself needing to shred paper, here are a few easy ways it can be recycled.

Separate the Shredded Paper Into a Bag

Check with your city’s waste management guidelines to ensure they will take shredded paper with your curbside pickup, as long as it’s in its own receptacle. Just be sure it’s not a plastic bag -- it’ll end up in a landfill, which defeats the purpose of your green efforts.

Check for Local Shredded Paper Pickup Services

Protocols may vary between cities and states, so be sure to check for services in your area. Some places have trucks that will get your shredded nuisance bits, though they may only do it by request.

Find a Shredding Event Near You

Many communities often host periodic free “shredding days” where the community can bring their scraps to machines specifically designed to handle shredded paper. If you have a safe place to store your documents, it can be well worth it to take advantage of these events. 

Check Your Area for Local Drop-off Locations

Check your area for designated drop-off sites for shredded paper or waste management facilities that are willing to collect shredded paper. Sometimes this service may require a fee or limit how much paper you are allowed to bring in. ​
While recycling shredded paper may require a bit of extra effort, it is a great start towards “going green” and saving our planet. The protocol for recycling shredded paper may vary based on your location, so this list may not include all of your options. Check with your local waste management for more information.  ​

Paper Shredding and Recycling with R4 Services

If you don’t want to have to worry about saving the planet, we’ll do it for you! R4 Services offers confidential, secure document destruction and disposal services. We do it for an array of different media types: tapes, disks, cartridges, x-rays, HDDs, monitors, film, and of course, paper. Check out our Destruction Services page and give us a call for more information.
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Paper Shredding Costs: DIY vs Professional Shredding

9/16/2022

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Paper Shredding Costs: DIY vs Professional Shredding

Every office has some sort of paper shredder in order to thoroughly destroy old documents that contain sensitive and personal information. But did you know that utilizing a professional document destruction and paper shredding service can actually be more cost effective for your business and save time and money? When you factor in the benefits of using professional paper shredding, either onsite or off, DIY paper shredding suddenly doesn't seem so appealing.

Save Time & Money with Professional Paper Shredding

How often do you shred your old documents? Between licenses, permits, financial information, insurance documents, staff info, and probably much more, there's a good chance that somewhere in your office or on some old hard drives, there's a treasure trove of outdated, sensitive information sitting around. This not only poses security risks but can interrupt office productivity whenever document retrieval is necessary or if old files cause clutter in your work environment.  

Many companies take paper shredding upon themselves by dedicating one or two employees to regularly shredding outdated documents. But this is not only a potential security breach; it's also time-consuming no matter who in the office takes on the task. They have to take out paper clips and staples and slowly, manually feed a few sheets at a time into a slow-working shredder that was presumably purchased from an office supply store that periodically breaks down. Between pulling that employee away from their normal duties, the cost of their labor, the cost of shredders, and the propensity for errors, you've got a lot of wasted time on your hands. 
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You'd be better off ordering a mobile shred truck to come to your office for occasional one-time document purges or secure shred bins for more frequent pickups. R4 Services' professional paper shredders are secure and discreet and can free up your staff's time while mitigating the headaches and costs that come with maintaining office shredders.

Keep Your Information Secure with Hard Drive & Paper Shredding

Never before has privacy been such a large-scale issue. With the advent of the internet, new technologies have been rapidly developing -- and so too have the abilities of hackers and thieves. These days it seems like data breaches are constantly in the news, and those are only the widely publicized ones. Millions and millions of records are compromised each year, the vast majority of them without any type of file encryption. All it takes is one employee to click on the wrong link from the wrong spam email, and suddenly your business adds to the statistics. More and more data breaches happen each year, so taking every precaution to ensure your files are secure is crucial. An estimated 60% of small businesses go out of business within 6 months of a security breach. The last thing you need is to become compromised because you didn't properly shred your banking info or fully destroy an old hard drive.

Our industrial hard drive and paper shredding equipment can handle any amount of data you can throw at it. R4 Services knows how sensitive your information is, which is why we:
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  • Collect material to be shredded and securely transport it for disposal. A receipt of items received will be issued at the time of collection.
  • Confidentially shred the material under the supervision of insured employees.
  • Issue a Certificate of Destruction upon completion of the destruction process.
  • Work with you to assist in your compliance requirements.

For more information, or to request a shred truck/shred bin, get in touch today!
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How to Destroy a Hard Drive Properly

8/26/2022

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How to Destroy a Hard Drive Properly

In today's digitized world, the vast majority of data is stored on hard drives (HDDs) and servers, otherwise known as the cloud. Some estimates conclude that 2.5 zettabytes of data exist in the world today. That may not sound like much, but one zettabyte is the equivalent of over one billion terabytes (TB). For comparison, today's higher-end laptops that tout high storage capacity usually come with 1TB.

With so much digital data flowing around us at all times, it's important to ensure that yours is secure. Unfortunately, as technology develops, so too do ways to exploit it. After all, if someone wants your SSN, banking info, or other personal data, they aren't breaking into your file cabinets or safe in the dead of night to get it. No, they'd much prefer hacking that info remotely. This is why it's important to know how to destroy a hard drive properly.

How Common Are Data Breaches?

You may be thinking to yourself, "data breaches only happen to big corporations. I'm a small business. I'm not at risk." But you'd be wrong. In fact, most cyber criminals decide to target small businesses because of their inadequate cybersecurity infrastructure. We only hear about breaches at larger corporations in the news because of their large scale, but small businesses are often easier targets for criminals.

According to reports from the Identity Theft Resource Center, 2021 set a new record for the total number of data breaches in a year. Unfortunately, this is part of a continuing trend that’s expected to keep rising each year. The cost of data breaches for businesses also continues to increase. The average data breach is estimated to cost businesses $4.35 million in 2022.

How NOT to Destroy a Hard Drive: Common Myths

Clearly, data security is rapidly becoming a serious issue for businesses, governments, and individuals alike. One of the best ways to protect yourself, your business, employees, and customers is by having rigid data retention and hard drive disposal policies. However, as with any new phenomenon, there are some myths surrounding the topic. Here are some commonly held methods of destruction that don't actually work.
  1. Reformatting: Reformatting your hard drive, in a nutshell, is preparing a drive for everyday use. The process erases all local files and restores your drive to a "blank slate," so to speak. However, because of how (re)formatting works, the "erased" data is still recoverable on a hard drive after the fact. All that's needed is the right software and some free time.
  2. Magnets: How do they work? Well, they don't. Not to fully destroy hard drive data, at least. You've probably heard the advice before: keep magnets away from hard drives because they can erase data. This advice may have been accurate in theory, but it never pertained to household magnets. The theory is that a hard drive's magnetic spinning disk, called a platter, is disrupted and unable to write and record data. However, the strength it would take to erase a hard drive is simply not found in run-of-the-mill fridge magnets; it would take MRI levels of magnet strength. There has been some anecdotal evidence of people using neodymium magnets to these ends. However, they merely render the hard drive unusable and do NOT destroy data, meaning it could still be recoverable by somebody who knows what they're doing. Plus, solid-state drives are on the rise to replace hard drives, and they don't even have moving parts to disrupt.
  3. Microwave: DO NOT DO THIS! Microwaving a hard drive is one of the most ineffective ways to destroy data, but it WILL be effective in starting a house fire. It will also cause irreparable harm to the microwave oven. And sure, it may render the hard drive unusable, but so long as the platter is intact (which a microwave will probably not affect), data can still be recovered from it.
  4. Water: Dunking a hard drive underwater is a great way to render it unusable. But generally speaking, hard drives are well sealed and prevent water from entering the main components. Even if water gets in, it will not affect the magnetically stored data on the platter and can eventually be recovered.

How to Destroy a Hard Drive Properly

One of the only surefire ways to destroy a hard drive and all the data contained on it is to have it shredded by professionals. Since a hard drive functions via the platter, a spinning magnetic disk, the most crucial part of decommissioning it is to destroy that platter and ensure the data on it is unrecoverable. As we pointed out above, quite a few rumors are floating around the internet on how to destroy hard drives, from muriatic acid to microwaves and more. But you shouldn't have to expose yourself to harmful chemicals, and do you really want to undertake a process that requires safety goggles?

If you want peace of mind knowing your data is fully wiped and scrubbed permanently from the face of the earth, then call in the professionals at R4 Services. We are discreet, secure, and professional. We'll come to you to collect and transport the materials, or you can stop by our facility. We confidentially shred all hard drives under the supervision of insured employees and issue a certificate of destruction upon completion. Our brand-new, state-of-the-art hard drive shredder can handle any number of drives you throw at it and will instantly reduce any drive to unrecognizable metal bits. We'll work with you to assist your organization in its compliance requirements.

For discreet and proper hard drive destruction, contact us today.
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4 Benefits of Document Scanning & Imaging Services

7/22/2022

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4 Benefits of Document Scanning & Imaging Services

​The number of workers who do their job remotely has drastically increased over the last several years, and it’s a trend that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. With remote workers becoming more common, businesses must be mindful about adapting their practices to accommodate these employees better. 

One way you can shift to remote work is through online record storage. Scanning and imaging all your documentation can feel like an overwhelming task, but the benefits outweigh the upfront commitment. Here are four benefits of using document scanning and imaging services for your business.

Quicker Retrieval for Important Documents

If your documents are scanned and available online, they are easy to find with a quick search on your computer. Forget about locating the right file cabinet, sifting through folders, and then shuffling papers to find the right document. Once documents are scanned and available online, they are easier to search through. 

When your documents are available online, you can perform a keyword search from your desk to instantly bring up the file you need. This gives you more time to spend on the other essential aspects of your business. Having your documents scanned and available online is a big time saver for companies whose workforce relies on home offices or has limited office space.

Access from Anywhere, Anytime

A physical piece of paper can only exist in one location, but a scanned document is available to you anywhere and anytime. Today's business world no longer revolves around routine 9 to 5 days with everyone working in the same location. With today's more flexible work schedules, there is an increased need to access information around the clock.  Many employees also work from a home office or on the road. 

When your documents are scanned, you can still retrieve information online no matter where you are located. This is especially crucial for the many businesses whose workers are unable to exchange or make copies in a traditional office setting.​

Customize and Edit Your Documents As Needed

Paper documents need to stay in pristine condition, and if multiple people use them, you can't make personal notes. But with an imaged file, you can add notes to a document and insert reminders or flags before you print. Scanning allows you to retain the original version of the file but also have an additional copy that is custom to your specific needs.

Create Backups for Critical Documents

If you’ve ever accidentally lost or damaged an important document, you’re not alone. Unfortunately, lost and damaged documents are an all too common workplace occurrence, so having all your essential documents securely backed up is a crucial layer of protection. R4 Services prioritizes the safety of your company’s information, and all of our document management is fully HIPPA compliant.

Scanning & Imaging Services with R4

The way of doing business continues to change, and having a solution like R4’s document scanning and imaging services is just one way to ensure that you’re prepared for the new work landscape and future changes to come.

For more information, contact us at 773-843-3915 or orders@r4services.com.

Other R4 Services Solutions include: 
Document Management
Shredding Services
Destruction Services
Hard Drive Destruction
Electronics Recycling
Vault Services
Indexing
Disaster Recovery
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How to Develop Medical Records Retention Policies

6/27/2022

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If you are in the healthcare industry, records are a fundamental part of your business. Documenting a patient's medical history is vital, and you may have information dating back decades. Building a records retention policy can feel overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be. Here are a few tips on how to develop effective medical record retention policies.

Know Your Legal Obligations

First, start with understanding the regulations for your industry, which vary by state. These regulations define how long you need to retain patient records. For example, the rules define if there are different requirements for minor and adult patients, the requirements for a medical doctor versus a hospital, and how long to retain documents after a patient's death. Use resources such as HealthIT.gov to learn about your state's specific requirements.

Define Active and Inactive Files

Next, you should set a standard to define which files are considered active vs. inactive. The active files will be those you regularly use, such as with patients who make routine visits. For those patients who have not sought treatment in several years, you may label their files as inactive. These files will require less frequent access. The American Health Information Management Association has recommendations to help you make this determination.

Determine Location

​Once you have determined which files you need to access frequently, develop an organization system to keep these active files handy. An alphabetical organization system of file cabinets for these active files is simple to implement. But your inactive files will require more work. Consider if you want to scan and index these files or store them offsite. Investigate the assistance of a documentation management firm like R4 Services that can consult with you and determine the most efficient solution for your needs.

Develop a Destruction Plan

Once an inactive file has passed its requirements for access, you don't need to continue to hang onto it. Instead, develop a plan to review your inactive files routinely, and flag those that no longer need to be retained. Determine a method for destroying electronic and paper files to ensure the private information is secure and you adhere to HIPAA standards.

Train Your Staff on Proper Retention Procedures

Lastly, properly training your staff on retention procedures is essential to your policy’s success. Ensure that your retention policy is adequately covered in your employee handbook and whenever you onboard new employees. Additionally, consider running periodic training sessions to keep your staff updated on best practices and make them aware of any changes to your retention policy.

Healthcare Records Management Solutions with R4 Services

Developing a comprehensive records retention policy isn’t just about keeping you and your staff better organized; it’s also necessary to stay compliant with the law. At R4 Services, we’ll work with your healthcare organization to help you meet compliance requirements and optimize your records management process. Contact us today to get started.
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3 Steps to Create an Information Security Plan

5/27/2022

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Increase Information Security
It seems as though every week, we hear about new security breaches. Whether it be an email server, a restaurant, or a larger institution, no one is safe from hackers until it’s too late. No matter the industry or the number of employees within the firm, increasing security is necessary for all businesses. Whether you are planning for future protection or are implementing a plan because of a breach, security and efficiency go hand-in-hand when protecting your business. Below are three ways to create an information security plan and ensure that your business runs efficiently.

1. Use Strong Passwords

The first step in protecting your information is creating strong passwords that are changed often and unique to each platform. Having the same password for every device and login makes you susceptible to hackers because they can access any account they choose once they have your password.

Don't share your passwords with anyone or leave notes around the office with passwords written on them. Doing so only makes it easier for your passwords to fall into the wrong hands. Instead, consider investing in password management software for both business and personal use. Password managers will securely store your passwords and help you create unique and strong passwords that you won’t have to worry about remembering yourself.

2. Protect Sensitive Data with Vault Storage

All businesses have paper. No matter how environmentally friendly organizations try to become, some documents must always be accessible. Storing documents either onsite or offsite should be secure, and only those authorized should have access to them. Protecting classified information, whether it is having a filing cabinet or a document cage,  will protect your business and ensure documents are up-to-date and in order. ​

R4 Service’s document management and vault storage offerings can help protect your business’s critical data and sensitive information. Our state-of-the-art storage facilities have centra