NHS Hospital Trust creates significant cost-savings

Industry

Healthcare

Challenge

The hospital had consolidated their records but wanted to minimise ongoing costs, reduce exposure to risk and have a clear, costed plan for phasing out their hard-copy records

Solution

Iron Mountain Smart Sort, which boxes up records by retention date

Value

The Trust estimate they will be able reduce their holdings by 80% over 7 years with a fully-costed and defensible destruction and storage programme, with an associated cost reduction of 70%.

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.