What we do (and don't do) at healthcare facilities
Ordinary decommissioning alongside specialty regulated-waste handling.
Healthcare junk removal sits in a specific operational lane. The space includes regulated medical waste (sharps, pathological waste, pharmaceutical waste, chemotherapy waste), RCRA-regulated chemicals, radioactive materials, and biohazard situations — all of which have specific federal, state, and local regulatory frameworks plus specialty contractors with the appropriate licenses. We don't operate in those lanes. What we do handle: the ordinary decommissioning work that runs alongside the regulated-waste handling.
That means furniture from administrative areas being decommissioned, fixtures and casework being removed during renovations, ordinary contents from offices and back-of-house areas, packaging waste from new equipment deliveries, IT equipment cleared by your IT security team for disposal (with R2-certified routing and NIST 800-88 destruction), and miscellaneous facility contents that aren't classified as regulated waste.
For healthcare clients new to this distinction: the sequencing usually goes EVS clears the regulated-waste streams first (or a specialty contractor does it for major decommissions), the facilities team or project lead provides clearance documentation, and we follow with ordinary decommissioning work. The clearance documentation matters — we don't accept work in spaces that haven't been cleared.
HIPAA, IT destruction, and the documentation chain
PHI destruction that survives an audit.
HIPAA's destruction requirements are specific. Protected Health Information has to be rendered unreadable, indecipherable, and unable to be reconstructed. For IT equipment containing PHI (workstations, servers, storage media, imaging-system disks), this means physical destruction of storage media under documented chain of custody, not just data wiping.
Standard documentation: serial-numbered destruction certificates routed through R2 or e-Stewards certified processors using NIST 800-88 compliant destruction protocols. The destruction record goes to your IT security officer, your HIPAA compliance file, and (where applicable) your covered entity's broader records. For high-sensitivity environments — academic medical centers handling research data, hospitals with restricted-access EHR systems — witnessed destruction is available where your security team observes the destruction process directly.
For paper records: confidential medical records destruction routes through NAID AAA certified shredding partners with chain-of-custody documentation. We coordinate with your records team on identifying records-retention-eligible material versus material cleared for destruction.
