Beatrice August and her husband weren't expecting to find patients' medical billing records in a pile of garbage on their New Orleans property, reports WDSU. But that's exactly what they discovered.
Ms. August said she doesn't know who dumped the debris on the property, which has been in her family for years.
"We came out here in November and we saw the first pile back there," she told WDSU. "Then when we came two weeks later, my husband and I came to check, and we saw this. We said, 'Oh my goodness, this is somebody's personal information out here.'"
Ms. August and her husband spent months attempting to clear the medical records from the property. They eventually contacted WDSU, which uncovered the records came from New Orleans-based LSU Healthcare Network. Some of the records were almost two decades old and included patients' names, addresses, insurance information and Social Security numbers.
"We just secured all the records that we could see, [and] we haven't even had enough time to go through them," said LSU Healthcare Network CEO J. Christian Winters, MD. "The only thing I can tell you is they appear to be remote records that were before Katrina, possibly associated with a building demolish after Katrina."