How Mitigation Techniques Preserved Sensitive Patient Records

SERVPRO of South Colorado Springs Medical Facility

When it comes to situations like flooding and water loss incidents, preserving the contents of our customer’s property is paramount. When the medical facility that you can see our marketing manager Dave Kraszewski pointing to in this video fell victim to flooding in its lower levels, our SERVPRO professionals responded quickly.

As you learn, the greatest threat to this facility was not water saturation and exposure to construction materials and structural concerns, but the sensitive documentation and patient records kept in those lower levels that now were at risk of irreparable damages. Our professionals needed to move quickly to remove these at-risk records and get to work on extraction and drying efforts.

Preserving these documents was not as simple as removing them from the area and restoring the property, however. By the time that our SERVPRO team arrived a short time after the damage got discovered, many of these boxes of sensitive data and information were already compromised. Our Contents Department placed these boxes into refrigerated trucks to a nearby facility for some intricate drying.

By the process of flash freezing documents, the moisture can get quickly and sufficiently extracted from the damaged parchment or paper. This process keeps penned and printed aspects of the paperwork from bleeding and becoming illegible. With a flash-frozen document in a pressure chamber, the pressure gets lowered significantly until the moisture within the affected document sublimates.

Once we had successfully completed this process for all of the affected documentation, we could return it to the medical facility. Instead of chancing storage in the lower levels again, the management of the building chose to store these revitalized items to a safe place on the upper floors.

While every water restoration job that our team undertakes does not require freeze drying sensitive documentation, it is nice to know that someone is in your corner. Our SERVPRO of South Colorado Springs specialists can help you to clean up the mess and preserve the things that matter the most. Give us a call anytime at (719) 574-2789.