3 Ways Healthcare Active Archive Benefits Hospitals and Health Systems

How Healthcare Active Archives Unlock the Value of Legacy Data

Healthcare active archives, with a focus on discrete data, combine the functionality of traditional health data archiving solutions with always-on data retrieval. They allow users to easily access hospital archive data as they would any patient record. Formatting information into standard data types enables hospital users to access, compile, and analyze legacy data long after the original application has been retired.

While healthcare active archives offer many uses, some of the most valuable benefits include:

1. Reducing cybersecurity risks by retiring older legacy software
2. Maintaining regulatory compliance
3. Maximizing the future value of legacy data

Reducing Vulnerability to Cybersecurity Threats

Hospitals and health systems, regardless of the size and complexity of their technical environments, rely on vast amounts of applications to support their daily operations. These typically include core applications like EHRs, billing, scheduling, lab management, PACS, along with a variety of specialized clinical and ancillary applications such as payroll, HR, and inventory management. This extensive digital footprint and the sensitive nature of healthcare data make healthcare organizations a prime target for cybercriminals.

Older healthcare applications are particularly vulnerable to security threats. Even if antiquated software is rarely used, it must still be connected to other applications and regularly patched to maintain security. However, at some point, vendors stop patching and releasing updates to these legacy applications, making them perfect backdoor entry points for cyber-attacks.

The scale of healthcare’s growing cybersecurity threat is evident in the numbers. Through the first nine months of 2024, nearly 64 million patient records had been exposed in 530 data breaches, according to the Office of Civil Rights. However, that doesn’t include the huge Change Healthcare breach in February, which impacted an estimated one-third of all Americans. It also doesn’t include the Ascension breach in May, the impact of which still hasn’t been reported to OCR.

Lawmakers have taken notice, with two senators filing what they call the Health Infrastructure Security and Accountability Act that would mandate minimum cybersecurity standards for healthcare providers, health plans, clearinghouses, and business associates. Among other requirements, organizations would need to perform stress tests to assess their ability to recover from cyberattacks. It would also subject organizations deemed critical to national security to annual audits.

By leveraging active archives for healthcare legacy data management, hospitals can significantly reduce the security risks posed by maintaining extensive technology footprints. It also helps lower the cost of maintaining legacy software data while providing hospital users access to the critical historical records they need for clinical, operational, and administrative purposes. When exploring active health data archiving vendors, look for companies that practice strong internal security controls and have received accreditation/certification from trusted organizations such as HITRUST.

Enabling Regulatory Compliance

Active health data archiving is invaluable for healthcare providers looking to streamline regulatory compliance. Most providers are required to retain clinical data for long periods, sometimes up to 20 or 30 years. By transitioning data to an active archive, hospitals and health systems can store it in a secure, modern format that remains compatible with current technology standards, ensuring accessibility for future needs.

Healthcare active archives are designed to keep data easily retrievable, allowing providers to respond promptly to regulatory audits or legal requests. By automating data retrieval, compliance tracking, and reporting for HIPAA data retention and other regulations, healthcare organizations can simplify and reduce the burden of Health Information Management (HIM) activities such as responding to audits and Releases of Information (ROIs), ultimately reducing the risk of costly penalties associated with non-compliance. Storing the data discretely allows organizations to explore cross-system data analytics and other opportunities that image or document-based archives do not accommodate.

For non-clinical data, such as patient accounting, healthcare active archives also provide significant value. Although retention periods for non-clinical data, like billing and insurance records, are typically shorter (around seven years), the need to respond to insurance inquiries, audits, lawsuits, or patient requests still requires maintaining accessible records. Moving this data to a less expensive, vendor-agnostic platform streamlines administrative and operational workflows, while reducing storage costs. This allows institutions to remain compliant without sacrificing operational efficiency.

Unlocking Actionable Insights for Future Use

Active archive systems transform legacy data into a dynamic asset that can be integrated with modern datasets for enhanced decision-making. When data remains locked in outdated systems, it is difficult to access, analyze, or combine with current information for regulatory reporting, population health management, or advanced analytics. By migrating data to a discrete, active archive, hospitals and health systems can standardize it for compatibility with new technologies, unlocking its potential for uses beyond compliance, such as AI and predictive modeling.

Active archiving of discrete data allows institutions to apply AI and machine learning to large datasets, identifying patterns and providing decision support that might not have been previously possible with legacy systems. This enhances clinical and administrative decision-making, offering actionable insights to inform tasks like workforce management or service expansion based on real-time data analysis.

Moreover, healthcare active archives enable broader data sharing within and across organizations, which is crucial for research, best-practice development, and retrospective studies. By moving data into a vendor-neutral environment, institutions can more easily collaborate on large-scale projects and identify trends in chronic diseases or missed diagnoses. As healthcare shifts toward global data-sharing, having historical data readily accessible in an active archive enhances collaboration toward initiatives aimed at improving patient outcomes.