Leveraging Healthcare Data Archiving for Competitive Advantage: 5 Post M&A Considerations for Healthcare Organizations

There’s little room for error when the affordability, efficiency, and security of your future IT infrastructure are on the line. How then, can you be sure you’re making the right call about the way to manage your legacy health data?

As someone who’s led hundreds of archival projects over the past 20 years, I’ve seen the best-and worst-case (and everything in between) scenarios involving post-merger legacy health data management.

I’ve learned there are 5 things that digital health leaders who successfully manage their organization’s legacy health data do or think about after M&As. 

1. Decide the Fate of Legacy Systems

Post-merger or acquisition, health systems typically consolidate to a single internal accounts receivable platform. But what happens to the legacy systems? You have several options:

• Keep systems running: Costly, but avoids the risk of data loss, often resulting in millions spent on maintaining outdated technology resulting in an increased cyber-attack surface.
• Migrate or Convert: Poses risks like data corruption or loss and expenses but integrates data into the current system, ensuring operational continuity.
• Implement legacy archiving: Strikes the best balance by reducing licensing fees and maintenance costs while retaining access to historical data.
• Using offline storage: Less costly but may complicate data retrieval due to lack of easy access and potential data retrieval delays.
• Destroying the data: Risky and may lead to compliance issues. Typically, healthcare data storage requirements guidelines require keeping records for as much to 30 years. Future data-driven innovation needs and insights could be compromised.

Dr. Pults recommends starting application rationalization early in the M&A process. She says, “The insights from your inventory are helpful to create a realistic EMR/EHR archiving budget. It can also inform your transition services agreement, ensuring you’ve set data transfer deadlines that match the scope and complexity of the IT environment.

3. Choose the Right Solution for Active Healthcare Data Archiving

A healthcare active archival gives users the ability to meaningfully interact with discrete data to perform valuable functions like searching or analyzing patient information. It consolidates multiple data sources into a single repository, enhancing operations.
Unlike a static archive where users are limited to “read only access” to data in a flat PDF, a healthcare active archive offers users interactive and flexible means of healthcare legacy data management. With an active archive, users can record corrections or release patient information, perform specific actions like changing demographics, send follow-up bills, edit, payments and more.
An effective healthcare active archive should have the following features.

• Single sign-on: Simplifies access across systems, allowing hospital staff to easily look up details within an archived medical record for clinical care and billing.
• Uniform data loading: Ensures consistent data integration, reducing errors and improving reliability.
• Cross-system patient information lookup: Enhances data accessibility, crucial for clinicians who need immediate access to patient histories.
• Data governance and compliance with data retention requirements: Ensure compliance with health care data retention requirements and requirements for creating, maintaining, and destroying patient records specified by local, state, or federal laws.
• Effective data management: Enables your organization to efficiently fulfill reporting requirements, like Release of Information (ROI) also requests so ensures data is properly formatted for analysis to drive data-driven insights, supporting future innovation.

4. Align with the Needs of Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) Staff

• Ensure their needs are met for maintaining accurate financial records.
• Identify potential issues such as discrepancies in billing data.
• Address issues before they escalate to keep your archival project on time and on budget.

5. Ensure Robust Data Retrieval and Reporting Capabilities

• The ability to generate transaction reports, which helps track financial performance.
• The capability to upload master files, ensuring comprehensive data inclusion.
• Support for batch or manual postings, offering flexibility in handling data entries.
• Options to post payments and adjustments manually or electronically, ensuring accuracy in financial records.
• The ability to manage demographic updates and audit requests efficiently, optimizing administrative processes.
• Interfaces for seamless integration, ensuring smooth operation across systems.
• The ability to generate customizable reports for compliance and strategic decisions to help you meet healthcare data compliance and healthcare storage requirements.

Active Healthcare Data Archiving Supports Seamless Post M&A Integration