Archival Whitepaper

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

Executive Summary

Despite the widespread adoption of EHRs, most healthcare organizations continue to struggle with patient data that is scattered across legacy platforms. It’s estimated that 50% of health systems are projected to be on second-generation technology by 2020 (Source: IDC), with drivers including mergers and acquisitions, vendor consolidation, application dissatisfaction, and product sunsets. As healthcare organizations replace obsolete clinical record systems with next-generation EHRs, they must overcome the challenge of disconnected legacy systems. In many cases, this results in healthcare IT teams supporting multiple legacy systems. This is resource-intensive and can be quite costly given licensing, support, and maintenance needs. Further, paramount to EHR replacement are considerations surrounding legacy data retention, as most states require protected health information (PHI) be retained for 7 to 25 years, or even longer (Source: HHS). Effective management of legacy data is critical to minimizing the disruption of EHR replacement and ensuring the transition does not compromise patient safety. Decommissioning legacy systems with a proven archival system reduces cost of labor, minimizes risk, ensures compliance, simplifies access and consolidates data.

VitalCenter Online is now known as Data Archiving.