Beyond Climate-Controlled Storage Units: Five Features You Need When Storing Medical Records

If you are looking for a commercial storage centre to keep records for your healthcare clinic, you need a facility that offers safe, climate-controlled storage. However, to ensure your documents are as safe as possible, you may want to look for some other features and amenities. Here are some items to consider when choosing commercial records storage:

1. Industry Compliance

When looking for a storage facility, it is usually more effective to choose a facility that focuses on commercial clients, rather than a general facility. Beyond that, you also want a storage facility that has special experience with medical records. In particular, you want a facility that understands compliance issues in the medical field.

For example, the Department of Health requires all records to be confidential, and it also requires you to have a separate record for every patient. A commercial storage facility understands these rules and stays current with changes to legal requirements, ensuring you never get in trouble for improper storage techniques.

2. Digital Document Storage

In most cases, you are likely to have some medical records on paper and others on digital storage devices. Ideally, so that you can keep everything together at one facility, you want a commercial storage facility that can handle both paper and digital records. Additionally, you may also want a facility that can store and organise recordings, x-ray films or records in any other type of format.

3. Records Management and Inventory Tracking

If you opt for a general storage centre, you typically put in your own shelves, place the records inside and deal with everything on your own. That can work in many cases, but it can also be time consuming and potentially disorganised. Instead, look for a commercial storage facility that offers records management and inventory tracking.

These facilities go a step further than general storage facilities. They can help you set up your records in a well organised manner, and they can apply a barcode to every physical record. If you need to get something out, you let the storage company know what you need, and they can easily find it for you. Additionally, if you ask them to download the storage records to your system, that makes it easy to set up your own database of the records you are storing.

4. Shredding Services

In most cases, you are only required to keep records for a certain amount of time. It can be a laborious process to go through the records, identify old ones and get rid of them. To avoid that hassle, look for a commercial records storage facility that offers shredding.

Ideally, the facility should mark each record and when it is ready for shredding. Then, as they receive alerts that some records need shredding, they should proceed with that. If possible, you may also want an alert that the document is being shredded. In other cases, you may want a digital copy made before the paper copy is shredded. Luckily, commercial storage experts offer a range of services like this, making it easy to find what you need.  

5. Data Breach Solutions

In spite of all the precautions you take, there may be cases where someone hacks into a digital database or breaks into a paper one. If this happens, you need to ensure the records storage facility is going to be by your side. What is their protocol in the case of a breach? Do they offer liability protection in case you are taken to court over a breach? If not, make sure you have your own coverage in place. Similarly, do they offer free identity theft protection services to clients who have had their identities stolen?