This hospital is one of
the UK’s largest Trusts,
looking after over 750,000
patients every year.
Since 1996 they have stored all
of their medical records with Iron
Mountain in a secure offsite facility,
enabling them to review and manage
all records in one place, via one
system, with full visibility of costs and
the ability to model future costs easily.
However, the Trust had circa 5 million
files stored with Iron Mountain
by 2022 and was aware that, due
to changing practices as well as
budgetary pressures, there was an
increasing need to review the way
records were managed as well as
to put in place a more proactive
destruction programme. The Trust
wanted to be in the best position to
reduce both the volume of records
and costs.
Historically, the files had been stored
on an open-shelf storage basis,
which means that files are stored
individually on low-density shelving
for fast access. This was a common
requirement for NHS files which
can be needed at very short notice.
However, this is a less widely-used
approach today as the NHS moves to
more digital ways of working.
The Trust worked with Iron Mountain
to review their entire holdings and
move to box-level storage with
reduced storage costs and files stored
together according to the year in
which they should be destroyed. Iron
Mountain frequently runs programmes
such as this under its ‘Smart Sort’
service, which means that files
can confidently and accurately be
destroyed at box-, rather than file
level, thereby also reducing activity
and destruction costs while still
maintaining a full chain of custody for
audit purposes.
