Staying one step ahead in todays complex contracting environment

Challenge:

Staying competitive in today's complex contracting environment.

Solution:

Federal Records Storage for Paper Records
Secure Shredding Services

Value:

• Cost savings of $600,000 per year.
• Achieve 100% NARA Compliance.
• Enhance efficiencies and processes.
• Compete successfully with today's MACs.

A company known as one of the country's leading administrative services contractors has been processing Medicare and Medicaid claims for government agencies for over 50 years.

With the recent shift in Medicare contracting, the company has been continuously challenged to stay competitive in this ever-changing, complex environment. Consequently, it realized it needed to maintain its good relationship with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), its Federal Government partner, to continue to grow and translate processes and efficiencies to compete effectively for Medicare Administrative Contracts (MAC s).

According to the company's Vice President of Enterprise Corporate Services, changes in government contracting requirements has been one of the top challenges it faces today.

Additionally, each Medicare Administrative Contractor (MAC ) documents and stores its records in a different manner, with different systems, from paper to electronic. Therefore, when the company was awarded new work, it had to transfer the data and try to make it useful across multiple systems within different regions.

Enhancing a longstanding partnership

Iron Mountain had been a longstanding records management partner for the company - not only storing its paper records, but also securely shredding and disposing of documents. By further developing this partnership to support this company in a much more competitive contracting landscape, it was able to gain a trusted records management advisor and take full advantage of its extensive knowledge and expertise.

"Iron Mountain has been our partner all the way," the Vice President of Enterprise Corporate Services stated. "[The Iron Mountain Team] has been instrumental in helping us develop new ways to stay a step ahead of any new regulations, market conditions or federal mandates and adjust our program to perform well."

Also, Iron Mountain was able to provide the company with the assistance it needed to win numerous contracts through one hundred percent compliance with standards set forth by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). It was the first MAC awardee to fully comply with the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) storage regulations, and it has helped it compete effectively for more business because it used Iron Mountain which is fully CFR 36 part 1234 compliant in its Federal Records Centers.

"The value we bring to the federal government is to align ourselves with the standards that it has requested we follow, which is NARA compliance. This has helped us to be a leader in the industry as far as compliance goes."

Vice President of Enterprise Corporate Services

Results

By leveraging this partnership, the company was able to double its inventory which has helped reduce its overall costs. In fact, it has increased its volume with Iron Mountain to over 560,000 cubic feet and renegotiated a new five year storage agreement at a lower storage rate to leverage scale. The reduction in storage rates saves the company over $50,000 per month, which is an annual savings of $600,000 per year at current volumes.

Furthermore, as a result of new contract awards over the past several years, the company has taken custody of nearly 200,000 cubic feet that Iron Mountain was storing for the company’s competitors. And because Iron Mountain was already storing the records, there was no charge for the removal and transportation of these records. Retrieval, permanent removal, transportation and receiving and entry could easily have cost more than $1 million for such a large volume. However, the company was able to work with Iron Mountain to simply transfer the records from the outgoing MAC into its account at no charge.

"It’s a competitive world of about ten MAC regions across the U.S. This is down from 15 regions just five years ago. We are in a much different bidding environment for our work."