Welcome back! This week, we’re diving into Cost #3: Service Costs.
Service costs are easily forgotten. Sometimes the costs are outright, like a shredding service. Other times, it may be merged with another cost, like the extra cost of insuring paper records is hidden within the cost of your overall insurance policy.
So, let’s dive in!
1. Shredding and Disposal Services
To comply with privacy regulations such as HIPAA, most documents must be securely disposed of.
Typically, this means hiring a professional shredding service like Iron Mountain. Other times, it can mean hiring someone to come in-house and shred the documents.
Shred-it charges ~$112 per box of storage documents. Shredding a single box per month comes to ~$1,344 per year.
Iron Mountain’s website says one-time shredding services start at $99. If you shred once a month, this would be ~$1,200 per year.
Shredding in-house could be a minimum wage role, but can take much longer than a service like Iron Mountain.
2. Archiving and Storage Services
Many agencies choose to store documents offsite at a facility instead of buying or renting larger office space. Some agencies hire document management services to organize and digitize paper records.
While document management companies are becoming more rare due to digital records, they are still available in many cities.
3. Transportation and Courier Services
While most agencies will transport their documents themselves (which costs the agency labor time), some agencies opt for courier services to securely transport paper records.
Iron Mountain is a large company that will transport and store paper records inside a mountain. As cool and secure as this might be, it’s expensive and unnecessary in the digital age we all live in today.
What’s more, storing records offsite can be helpful, but it causes lots of frustration during audits if someone has to drive out to find records.
4. Compliance Service Costs
A commonly overlooked expense is the compliance cost of paper. We’ll dive more into this in a few weeks, but for today, we want to look at compliance review services.
We’ve spoken to several agencies that hire someone every year to review paper documents for completeness and organization so they sleep better at night.
Why?
Because paper brings lots of problems and errors. So the hope is this outside party catches errors before auditors drop in.
The problem?
These third-party auditor services are expensive. One agency said it was going to cost them over $10,000 to review the records of their ~70 clients!
5. Insurance and Risk Management
We mentioned this earlier, but insurance companies often charge more for insuring paper/physical records. Why? Because they’re riskier than digital records–they’re harder to keep private, they smudge when wet, can get blown away during a storm, and can burn.
If you don’t have insurance, or if your insurance doesn’t cover paper records, then you’re taking on more risk yourself, and that’s a hidden cost.
6. Technology and Equipment Maintenance
Copy machines, printers, and other equipment often have maintenance or other service subscriptions. HP started a new one a couple years ago for ink.
For a “flat fee” each month, they’ll mail you ink as you need it. The problem? It was costing more than if I purchased ink when I needed it.
For agencies that print every day, the paper dust can clog machines and cause real maintenance concerns. That’s why Lexmark and other large machine companies have service subscriptions.
7. Training and Education
Do you remember going to the library for the first time and learning how to use the Dewey Decimal System?
I do. It was confusing at first and took forever looking through the drawers to find the book.
It’s the same with paper records for providers. Each supervisor has to be trained to find the records, and if someone accidentally puts the record in the wrong spot, it can be a major project to find it.
So how many services are you using?
Thanks for reading & stay tuned for next week’s deep dive into Time Inefficiencies of paper!