Even as technology costs drop and cloud options grow, hospitals are hampered by their legacy systems in moving forward. One of the biggest challenges that carries a significant cost and security concern is in the management of older patient data—medical records that bring a 360 degree view of a patients’ medical history potentially including digital x-rays, CAT scans, MRIs and the list goes on. But also the financial relationship with the patient and the insurance carrier(s).
Healthcare providers are squeezed between adopting new electronic health records (EHR) – like EPIC and Cerner – but also what is needed in the modern world of digital billing. For example, Epic does not want to import patient history more than 18 months in age. What to do with the decades of data from the potentially dozens of systems the new EHR cannot or will not manage?
You could keep the old running and write custom ‘connectors’ = but you just doubled their costs. Most older patient records are also running on hardware and software that is no longer viable in the market. IBM AS/400s have not been made by IBM for over 10 years. Operating systems like Solaris, IBM and HPUX are not keeping up with all the ‘security hacks’ and potential exposures. The yearly maintenance paid for support is going up and the power to keep these systems running can run into $millions$. The people who understand these old platforms are also retiring. And nothing new is gained!
ANSWER: Thoughtfully retire and connect to the new system.
The journey begins by understanding your options. Platform 3 solutions can bring the right tools, experience and methodologies from the very beginning of the conversation. It starts with an open, XML-based, future proofed architecture repository that respects the data relationships, chain-of-custody and compliance requirements. Platform 3 Solution uses InfoArchive by Opentext as this system-of-record.
Next is Platform 3’s Archon product. This brings:
- Connect to any of your legacy systems is seamless
- Analyze and automatically identify the data relationships and sensitive information rather PII, PCI and PHI automatically. This includes all needed entity-relationship and data keys and cardinality using the legacy system DDL libraries, referential integrity and stored procedures along with sampling the data to identify and validate key and HIPAA data.
- Having a scalable engine to move the data to InfoArchive
- Autoconfigure InfoArchive including the relationships and those data-points that need to be redacted for HIPAA.
- Autogenerate query and report screens to allow searching and the resulting output are ease to use, but also adhere to security and compliance requirements through query editing, column and data masking.
- Maintains chain-of-custody as data moves from the older system into the archive – so judges and lawyers cannot question the validity.
Lahey Health is doing this now
A Massachusetts based healthcare provider with 500 doctors and 5,000 nurses, therapists and staff that used InfoArchive to retire old systems (and save money) while also moving to Epic as the new EHR systems.
We needed this data somewhere it would be accessible to our clinicians in an efficient manner, taking advantage of user and patient context.
– David Reis, Ph.D., CIO, Lahey Health
Where to start?
Ask us at Platform 3 Solutions to have a conversation, show you our tools and consider a proof-of-concept to understand what is possible. If you have a pile of maintenance coming due that pays for technology not in active use – here is your route to spend that money to help patients and doctors bring better healthcare forward. Learn more at www.platform3solutions.com