Elevating compliance and enabling defensible destruction after a merger

How iron mountain standardized policy and simplified enforcement for one large medical device company

The challenge

After the merger of two different medical device companies, the newly combined global Human Resources (HR) operations team lacked visibility into stored protected health information (PHI) and other sensitive, vital records. Without a holistic view of what was currently being stored, what might be non-essential, and what should be slated for safe destruction, the company had to maintain all of the records. This was not only impacting storage costs, but it also increased risk of audit failure which could lead to costly fines and loss of customer and partner trust. Additionally, due to the pandemic, the operations spanning multiple countries did not have staffing available to handle additional document processing.

The Situation

• High cost of both maintaining compliance and risk of legal fallout
• Lack of resource to manage data destruction and digitization
• Budget constraints limited rollout of available data management solutions
• Highly regulated industry with unpredictable audits

The solution

Given Iron Mountain's global presence, experience in the life sciences industry, and deep expertise in information governance, the company's corporate HR team chose them to design a workable solution given a limited budget and restricted timeline.

The first phase focuses on creating the corporate policy and processing records stored in their three largest markets, the United States, Mexico, and Uruguay. Using a customized version of Policy Center, HR teams in each target country are collaborating on the policy design with help from Iron Mountain subject matter experts. In parallel, Iron Mountain staff are reviewing the physical records, capturing required metadata, classifying them by type, and destroying non-essential documents.

n the second phase, Iron Mountain will shut down the customized Policy Center instance and move to deliver a complete global document management solution. The company's HR departments will be responsible for records review and policy implementation in the remaining geographies.

The results

Iron Mountain elevated enterprise-wide program compliance visibility and the need for ongoing document management. Working within the customer's budget constraints, Iron Mountain addressed immediate needs and provided a practical plan to expand their Americas-based retention schedule to other geographies. The company's HR teams have benefited from increased collaboration, are anticipating significant storage cost savings, and looking forward to sharing their success with other departments within the company.

Key Benefits

• Fully documented and auditable HR records management policy
• Established plan for rolling out records management policy to remaining geographies
• Increased collaboration among HR teams
• Reduced risk through defensible destruction of eligible records