Tapping the Potential of Legacy Data

3 Practical Use Cases for Legacy Data

The word is out about legacy data. Once largely overlooked as a strategic business asset, legacy data now plays an active role in supporting multiple aspects of mission-critical healthcare operations more than ever.

Here are three of the most common ways health systems are using their legacy data to drive meaningful and measurable impacts throughout their organizations: 

1. Optimizing Workflows: Clinicians, HIM, finance, and administrative hospital staff must have access to critical historical patient records. For example, to determine proper care and treatment plans for patients, clinicians must be able to view and analyze a patient’s complete medical history, even if that information resides in an old application. Additionally, maintaining compliance with regulatory standards—which often includes responding to requests for releases of information (ROIs)—requires seamless data transitions from legacy to current applications.

 2. Supporting Profitable Revenue Cycle Management: Streamlining revenue cycle management enables healthcare organizations to maintain profitable operations. Active data archiving gives accounts receivable teams timely access to historical billing data to work down AR effectively. According to the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s report, Best Practices for Resolution of Medical Accounts, “healthcare providers face increasing challenges in collecting payments, with many reporting that unresolved medical accounts significantly strain their financial resources and efficiency.” Active archives help improve billing processes, minimize denials, and maximize reimbursement rates.

 3. Driving Insights for Innovation, Research, and Beyond: Legacy data holds the potential to support numerous secondary uses and initiatives—many still undreamed of. Turning this potential into reality starts with liberating legacy data so that it becomes actionable to be used effectively. As machine learning and other advanced technologies continue to emerge, the possibilities of extracting new insights from legacy data are virtually limitless. For instance, AI algorithms can analyze historical patient data to identify warning signs for remitting relapsing multiple sclerosis, offering a new dimension of patient care.

Why Healthcare Active Archives Are Growing in Popularity

Beyond these common use cases, healthcare active archives are gaining traction within hospital and health system IT departments for several key benefits they deliver:

1. Reducing IT Expenses: Between licensing fees, operating costs, and resources, maintaining legacy applications is expensive. An active archive can lower IT expenses by replacing multiple legacy applications with a single, consolidated archive that retains critical interfaces and data. Once the exorbitant licensing fees and costs involved in managing obsolete or outdated applications are removed, healthcare organizations can reduce IT costs considerably. Decommissioning legacy applications and consolidating their IT portfolio through an active archive often delivers dramatic cost savings at a time when many healthcare organizations are looking for relief from immense financial pressure.

 2. Ensuring Regulatory Compliance: Meeting healthcare data storage requirements for HIPAA compliance is one of the most widely known benefits of active healthcare data archiving. Healthcare providers must adhere to HIPAA regulations to protect patient information and prevent unauthorized access to protected health information (PHI). This involves implementing tailored safeguards, complying with state and federal laws along with specific organizational policies. An effective active archival solution should offer features that ensure retention standards are met to help healthcare organizations avoid costly penalties and fines.

 3. Reducing Cybersecurity Risks: Leaving legacy data unprotected can make it a prime target for cyber threats like ransomware attacks. Many older applications aren’t regularly updated, increasing their vulnerability. Moving this data into a healthcare active archive reduces the attack surface, secures sensitive information, and allows IT teams to focus on protecting current applications while keeping legacy data safe. By actively managing their archives, healthcare organizations can better safeguard legacy data from potential breaches to keep vital healthcare information protected.

 4. Promoting Interoperability: Active archives are crucial for enhancing interoperability across healthcare systems, allowing seamless data exchange between different platforms and organizations. Regulations like the CURES Act encourage better data sharing among providers, and a well-organized archive supports better patient care and clinical outcomes. Kel Pults, MediQuant’s Chief Clinical Officer and VP of Government Strategy, aptly shared with Health Data Management, “By adopting a standardized approach to data sharing, patients could enjoy a smoother, more efficient healthcare experience while still having the peace of mind that their privacy and security are safeguarded. This balance is essential for improving patient outcomes, reducing care delays, and enhancing overall patient satisfaction.”

Managing active archives is not without challenges. Healthcare CIOs must carefully understand and assess their portfolio of legacy applications to determine which ones should be archived. This process, called application rationalization, requires a delicate and sometimes tricky balance between managing competing stakeholder interests in order to separate apps from the users who love them.

Additionally, securing the budget for active archiving requires proper planning to accurately engage the size and complexity of the project. An experienced archival partner should provide valuable guidance to assess the scope of archival, yet many too often come up short. Improperly scoped archival is a recipe for unexpected complexities that will inevitably send project timelines—and budgets—spiraling.

Despite these challenges, with the right partner and healthcare legacy data archive solution, the potential benefits that healthcare organizations gain with active archives far outweigh the challenges, making the effort not only worthwhile but necessary.