Solution Focus: Data Archiving

Reducing IT Costs:  Healthcare organizations often struggle with technical debt, the accumulation of outdated systems and processes. Data archiving significantly lowers IT costs by decreasing or eliminating the expenses required to maintain and manage legacy applications. Managing a single data archive also reduces pressure on IT

Ensuring Regulatory Compliance: Most providers are required to retain clinical data for long periods, sometimes up to 20 or 30 years. A quality EMR archive solution should include features to automate compliance tracking and reporting for HIPAA data retention and other regulations. Your EMR archive solution should also simplify and reduce the burden on your hospital staff for common HIM activities such as responding to audits and Releases of Information (ROIs). Such functionality is critical to decrease the risk of costly penalties associated with non-compliance of federal, state, and organization-specific regulations governing medical record retention.

Increasing Operational Efficiency: Hospital staff must have access to legacy data to support various clinical, financial, and administrative operations performed throughout the continuum of care. This includes clinicians who often refer to EMR data archives for patient care, as well as HIM teams that leverage it for compliance tracking and reporting. It’s also vital for accounts receivable staff to have seamless access to EMR data archives in order to work down A/R, helping avoid revenue cycle disruptions during IT transitions and supporting profitable hospital operations. EMR data archives streamline and centralize access to legacy data for hospital and health system users, making it easy for them to access and use in operational, administrative, financial, and clinical workflows.

Lowering Cybersecurity Risks: Legacy applications are vulnerable to security threats because outdated applications often lack the necessary security updates and patches, leaving gaps for cyber criminals to exploit. Decommissioning legacy data and storing it in an EMR data archive reduces the attack surface to better ensure that sensitive patient data is protected. Additionally, active EMR data archives with features such as HIPAA auditing and tracking and role-based access offer additional layers of protection against the increasing threat of cyber-attacks such as ransomware, that can lead to data breaches, patient care disruptions, and severe financial losses.

Unlocking Data Insights for Secondary Use: Active archiving of discrete data maintains the integrity and usability of legacy data, preserving its value for future initiatives.The archives also enable healthcare organizations to apply AI and machine learning to large datasets so they can better analyze and identify patterns, gleaning meaningful insights to inform smarter, strategic decisions. This empowers healthcare providers, researchers, and other stakeholders to leverage legacy data for future uses such as chart reviews, population health studies, patient engagement initiatives, clinical research — and more.

Data Governance and Stewardship: To develop the most EMR data archiving plan, organizations need a clear understanding of and alignment with both short- and long-term IT and broader hospital goals. This insight is key to identifying and classifying which data sets should be archived and which can be identified through an application inventory. Application rationalization helps organizations determine which data sets are essential for long-term storage and compliance purposes. The insights gained through this process provide invaluable context that can inform other critical data management decisions such as evaluating and choosing storage options.

Data Extraction: The success of data conversion, migration, and archival depends on complete and accurate data extractions. Consequently, data extraction errors often derail IT transitions, exceeding budgets and timelines. Because some applications are easier to extract than others, deep application expertise is critical. Any vendor that performs data extraction must fully understand the unique vendor-specific nuances involved in extracting certain applications. For instance, see Cerner and Epic as examples. Additionally, data extraction requires extensive preparation to enable subsequent data mapping., and thorough validation is vital after extraction to ensure data integrity. An experienced EMR data archive partner will know the right questions to ask vendors upfront before extraction. This is critical to ensuring a full understanding of the scope of work, helping to determine the right tools, process, and timeline for data extraction.

Data Conversion and Migration: Legacy data may need to be converted and migrated into a standardized format to ensure compatibility with an organization’s go-forward EMR or HIS application(s). Choosing the right data transformation tools and techniques is crucial for smooth migration. Thorough validation ensures that legacy data successfully converts to the new application, verifying that it is complete, error-free and that workflows are fully operational before data conversion and migration.  

Decommissioning: After data is prepared, mapped, loaded, and validated, the legacy application is typically “frozen” and final data is received for archiving. Due diligence throughout this phase is essential. Before your organization signs off on its EMR data archive, additional validation is necessary to identify and resolve any data quality issues that may arise and verify that functionality meets your expectations, supporting adoption of your archive. After your EMR data is archived, final compliance reporting and transition support should be provided for not only ensuring a seamless rollout but also verifying that your EMR data archive is properly maintaining compliance with applicable data retention requirements.