Pizza place employee makes partial recovery of the files

Jun 8, 2015 22:31 GMT  ·  By

Personal and medical information belonging to patients in Northwest Indiana was found in a dumpster bin in the area, after a blood testing lab closed.

The data is regarded as highly confidential and should have been discarded in a manner that would not allow it to be recovered, such as passing it through a shredder or burning it to ashes.

Restaurant employee finds highly sensitive data

About 170 records were recovered by an employee at a nearby restaurant. After taking a look at the content, it became clear that they belonged to the now closed My Fast Lab, a medical facility that ran blood tests at low prices.

The information contained social security numbers, driver’s licenses, health insurance cards, names, addresses, phone numbers, blood types, email addresses and credit card numbers with expiration dates and security codes.

Adam Mitchell found it when taking out the trash from the pizza place he works for. Mitchell has the habit of taking a look at what’s in the bin in search of things that may be of value because the dumpster is also used by a storage facility nearby, NWI.com reports.

He could not recover all the records because about half of them had been stained by the food and liquid in the dumpster. At the moment, the data is under the care of Indiana attorney general’s office.

Thousands of records also found in dumpster in Kentucky

This is not the first case in which medical records get dumped in a public site without the slightest regard to the confidential nature of their content.

Last week, information belonging to thousands of patients of a radiology facility in Richmond, Kentucky, also ended up in a dumpster. However, the data was placed in sealed boxes, which had not been tampered with.

This too was a result of a medical facility closing down, but the business ended in early 2000s and the boxes had been sitting in an abandoned storage space. As a new customer rented storage, an employee cleared the space, without knowing what was inside the boxes.