Data Management in Healthcare: Dr. Kel Pults at HIMSS25

Mark Hagland: Good day. I’m Mark Hagland, Editor in Chief at Healthcare Innovation. We’re here at HIMSS25, we’re meeting with a lot of fun, exciting people, and it’s my privilege and pleasure to meet with Kel Pults, who is Chief Clinical Officer and Vice President of Government Relations Strategies at MediQuant. Kel, it’s great to be with you. Tell us just a little bit about what MediQuant does.

Kel Pults: So MediQuant is a technology company. We do active archiving. This year, we will be in business for 26 years. We were the first in the space, and over the years, obviously, it’s grown quite a bit. Enterprise active archives, so financial, anything that really you can think of in a hospital, we archive those records and then you have active functionality access from the new records, that kind of thing.

Mark Hagland: So one of the most interesting things right now, we know that the pace of change has intensified in healthcare. There’s a lot of systems, a lot of documents, there’s a lot of software. How would you make sense of a bit of the chaos that’s out there for your kinds?

Kel Pults: Well, I think one of the things we do is really, really help them prioritize. We figure out what they’ve got, rationalized applications, to your point, there’s a lot out there, a lot of change going on. So we do, app rationalization, help them determine where data goes, what do they even need to keep? Some data goes through data Lake, for example, some will go to an archive. Some they can just get rid of, depending on the retention policies, but it’s really more rather than doing and thinking of it as a data management project. We think of it as a program. It really becomes a program. It the scalables and that way you can sustain this plan as data grows, as you change new vendors, you’ve got a plan in place to adapt to that.

Mark Hagland: And one of the things that’s really impacting this area I would think is the ongoing pace of consolidation of provider side, right? One organization and how does that complexity process complexity impact what you do?

Kel Pults: Well, we do see a lot of merger and acquisition activity to your point. They’re typically responsible. They take over ownership with the clinical records in particular, not always the financial but the clinical side, and they typically put them on whatever system they have. They acquire the clinic and then we take the old stuff and it goes into an overall archive plan so that they still have access to the records, they can do release of information and meet all of their regulatory compliance requirements.

Mark Hagland: What are the biggest challenges of all that?

Kel Pults: I would say probably the is a differential or the different systems for one, but they’re disparate, right? There’s a lot of old systems out there, homegrown systems. a lot of legacy and so, that old technology, in particular, we’ve done a lot of homegrown systems, a lot are very difficult, that’s something that we’re specifically known for in the market is handling all the complexity around that being able to get all that stuff, not in a normalized fashion, but get it harmonized into the archive where it’s viewable at the patient level, that provider level, and from an HIM perspective, they can release those records as required by law.

Mark Hagland: How do you see this landscape evolving forward in the next two years?

Kel Pults: I do think there’s probably going to be more AI that happens, but it’s got to be responsible. As some of the stuff we look at, there is a lot more regulatory compliance, looking at patients accessing their own records. That’s part of the Cures Act, and so we, you know, support the Cures Act from a USCDI perspective, we’re at version five with that, and then patient access so they can access their own records, and then using AI in doing implementation. AI is kind of a buzzword right now, but we’ve taken the stance that we’re going to do it responsibly, use it when you should and be careful with what you’re doing with it to make sure that, you know, you’re staying in from a not just a regulatory perspective, but there’s the right way and wrong way to use technology, and so we’re very thoughtful and careful because we do deal with PHI, PI, we want to make sure that, you know, we’re staying in compliance as well.

Mark Hagland: And there’s a lot of uncertainty now as to what will happen with TEFCA. Will that impact your work?

Kel Pults: It will. So, the archive records make up part of the designated record set, which is tough, it’s all about the interoperability, the fire. We do fire transactions now with some of our customers, and that interoperability piece is huge. The way we sort of look at this is the big part of the responsibility or the drive that TEFCA has is being able to exchange those records electronically, and then patients also being able to use that technology. The designated record set is not just what’s in the EHR. It’s about what the whole record includes so that includes your archive records, so it does affect us, so we send things out with fire just like the HR does. I think where TEFCA has some challenges is getting some of the vendors, the big vendors in particular, agreeing to some of these interoperability standards and working together.

Mark Hagland: It is going to be very important, very important. And the last question, our core audience is the cite leaders in hospitals, medical groups and health systems. What would you like to say to them about what they should know going forward right now?

Kel Pults: There’s a lot of change in the industry and health care in general around interoperability. When you’re thinking about doing any major project, think downstream. So that’s something that we’ve learned over the years, is a lot of times you think about putting in a new HR. You don’t they don’t necessarily immediately think about the legacy systems that they’re going to get rid of, right? their goal is to reduce cost, but keep in mind reducing the footprint overall, putting that legacy project as part of your overall capital expenditure when you’re putting in a new EHR plan for it now, So that you’re not having to go back and ask for additional funds for that and work it into a program early on, whether you’re looking at it from a merger and acquisition perspective or you’re just moving to a new EHR as an organization. Those types of things need to be thought of ahead of time.

Mark Hagland: Well, it’s been great to sit and talk with you.

Kel Pults: Thank you, it was great talking to you too.

Mark Hagland: Thank you so much. I hope everyone has a great rest of their HIMSS. Thank you for viewing this video. Have a great day.