Legal considerations for healthcare data archiving

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

There are many legal considerations to evaluate when navigating the complex data structure and data sets, legal and compliance requirements, and continuity of care requirements that characterize effective healthcare legacy application retirement. Successful and risk-minimized healthcare data archiving requires the preservation of not only the organization defined legal medical record, but also data sets such as contextual audit trails, referenced data in ancillary systems, data change and version history, and even database metadata.

Key Takeaways:

• Preserve the Integrity of the Complete Record
  An organization’s ability to preserve the integrity and completeness of the original record, especially the ability to recreate a copy of the record as it existed at the relevant time in question, may be compromised when EMRs are replaced.
• Don’t Overlook Version History
  The version history for individual clinical items is a major data set often overlooked in data archiving.
• Retain Audit Trails
  Ensuring that a robust audit trail is retained and archived is essential for capturing the precise sequence of events, provides evidence that justifies and/or explains what actions have occurred, and is also vital to satisfy e-Discovery requests.
• Purging Archived Data Has Significant Legal Risk
  When it comes to purging of archived data, the ambiguity around retention guidelines at the state and federal levels have resulted in organizations putting themselves in
  considerable legal risk.

VitalCenter Online is now known as Data Archiving.