CBBS: A survey on the use of social security numbers to identify volunteer blood donors

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A survey on the use of social security numbers to identify volunteer blood donors

Sally Morgan-Gannon, MT(ASCP)SBB, Compliance Officer at BloodSource in Sacramento (attribution used with permission), reports that later this summer, she will be speaking to a national blood banking group about the use of Social Security Numbers (SSNs) and identity theft issues. She comments that since California was the first state to enact laws protecting the use of SSNs, there is much interest around the country about what donor collection sites in California use to identify donors, since SSNs may still be used for this purpose if the state rules are followed (CA Civil Code Sect. 1798.85). For her talk, Sally would like to share (without site identity) how sites (both hospital-based donor collections facilities and independent blood centers) in California that collect volunteer donors are using SSNs. This survey was submitted to the e-Network Forum on July 8, 2005 and replies were requested to be received by July 20, 2005. Below are the results of this survey.

Total Respondents	Question 1: Does your California (volunteer) donor collection organization (one reply per organization) currently use the Social Security Number (SSN) for positive donor ID?	Question 2: If not, is the SSN part of your donor records (hardcopy or electronic) from past use?
13	Yes - 11	Yes - 5 + 6*
13	No - 2	No - 2

* 6 did not reply to Question #2, but are assumed to have SSN in their records since they are using SSN either exclusively to ID donors, or as one form of ID.

Thank you to all who participated in this survey!

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Please submit comments to the e-Network Forum.

Ira A. Shulman, MD
CBBS e-Network Forum Editor & Moderator

Posted: July 8, 2005

Addenda: July 21, 2005

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