Application Decommissioning: Best Practices for Data Migration and Archiving

This content was originally created by Galen Healthcare, now part of RLDatix.

Findings from a survey of hospital and health system IT leaders

After years devoted to the infusion of technology into clinical workflow, healthcare delivery organization CIOs have come to realize that their earlier adoption of best-of-breed strategies has rendered them vulnerable to security breaches, encumbered by an increasing number of data silos, and frustrated by duplicative functionality, sprawling infrastructures, dependence on institutional knowledge,
and burdensome licensing costs.

As a result, CIOs are now turning to data archiving solutions to rationalize their complex healthcare information technology and system portfolios. While it may be perceived as a trivial task, data archiving is not as simple as it seems. Some may view successful archiving as simply having a raw data backup, yet this undermines the value and legal ramifications of the data. Archival solutions must retire not just core applications such as the EMR and EHR, but also LIS, RIS, and ERP, while making data accessible, accurate, and secure.

Galen Healthcare Solutions and healthsystemCIO partnered to survey the current market to gauge sentiment, distill best practices, and measure decommissioning priorities, weighing these against organization demographics. Accordingly, we surveyed 70 CIOs to identify trends in system transitions and archiving to obtain a better understanding of the factors that affect and drive health information technology application decommissioning and retirement.

VitalCenter Online is now known as Data Archiving.