Healthcare data is now increasing at an exponential rate. Health data’s growth rate is estimated at 48% annually. The volume of data is expected to be at least 2,314 exabytes in 2020, up from about 153 exabytes seven years ago. Today, advances in technology have made it possible to store data from CT and MRI scans in electronic health record databases. As data increases, the need for a healthcare data archive becomes more pronounced.
Similarly, the mergers and acquisitions commonplace in the healthcare industry are forcing providers to replace old EHRs. However, providers must preserve patient records to ensure access to historical records and comply with government regulations.
Here are the most important reasons why you need an efficient data archive in your organization.
1. Satisfy Regulatory Requirements
All healthcare organizations must maintain legacy data to comply with state and federal regulations. Some states require healthcare providers to keep records for as long as 30 years.
All hospitals must also respond promptly to requests for information for financial, legal, and other reasons. That is why you need to hold all patient medical records in a well-designed archive that permits vendor-neutrality.
This central store of patient data must meet HIPAA compliance requirements and be accessible to applications through an effective search system.
2. Enhance Research for Better Patient Care
After transiting from one EHR platform to another, compliance is not the only reason for keeping legacy data. Your practice needs to keep comprehensive medical records for future research.
The data residing in your EHR can provide many cues for improving patient care. With the right analytics tools, you can discover trends, insights, and other metrics that will transform the way you provide care to patients.
For this reason, as soon as you retire a legacy EHR, you need to export all the data that will be useful for research.
3. Reduce IT Costs
It is necessary to archive data for financial reasons. Maintaining legacy systems is both expensive and risky.
When a system gets replaced or is no longer supported by the vendor, maintaining software can be quite expensive. It is better to export the data from the software into an archive and decommission the legacy system.
Keeping the outdated system will eventually become a financial burden. Your organization will need to keep paying to manage old data. Eventually, subscription fees will quickly add up without adding a corresponding value.
Data archiving offers substantial financial savings, and a study has shown that over 80 percent of organizations that archived their data have gained an economic benefit.
4. Avoid Data Breaches
Data archiving is not the only viable solution for preventing a data breach. However, it is an essential step towards securing your data and keeping your system compliant.
Often, CIOs may not realize that solving security problems associated with active data is not the same as securing access to data in legacy systems.
As much as possible, it is better to bring all data together in one central data storage system than to keep data silos. Data archiving makes it possible to monitor all your healthcare data in one central location and ensure that all necessary security protocols focus on it.
Now that you know the benefits of building a secure data archive for all your legacy data, what’s the next step?
See a Demo of a Healthcare Data Archive
Get in touch with MediQuant through our contact page to discuss your data management needs. Give us now a call at 844.286.8683 to see a free demo of our data archiving solution.