ADVICE FOR HEALTHCARE ORGANIZATIONS SEEKING TOCENTRALIZE PATIENT RECORDS, DECOMMISSION LEGACY SYSTEMS

November 2014 1

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November 2014 1

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ADVICE FOR HEALTHCARE ORGANIZATIONS SEEKING TOCENTRALIZE PATIENT RECORDS, DECOMMISSION LEGACY SYSTEMS

ith patient information still existing on multiple systems, and even on paper, experts are urging healthcare organizations to find new solutions to the problem of fragmented patient records. Doing so, they say, will improve patient safety and quality, head off compliance issues and reduce costs.

Despite the advent of the electronic medical record (EMR), clinical and non-clinical staff in most organizations continue to struggle with scattered patient data stored across legacy platforms. Depending on which patient data they need to access, this requires staff to log onto multiple systems, creating not only inefficiencies, but also a risk to quality of care.

“CIOs, CTOs, master data managers and compliance personnel should take every opportunity to reduce the amount of legacy data they maintain,” says Barry Runyon, vice president of research at Gartner, a Stamford, Connecticut-based consulting and services firm. “Legacy data that can be legitimately removed should be during decommissioning. Data that no longer has immediate value to the enterprise … contributes to unnecessary storage growth, storage-related spending and e-discovery risks.”

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Reducing the amount of legacy data and merging all patient information into one centralized system will also improve quality of care and enhance clinician productivity.

Retaining legacy applications is also expensive, since it requires servers, storage and software licenses, ongoing additional administration and continuous upgrades. Since more data increases load on existing production systems, having legacy data spread out in multiple locations can also compromise application performance.

LEGACY SYSTEMS RISK HIPAA COMPLIANCE FOR ORGANIZATIONS Patient records must be retained long-term, not only for the purposes of safety and better quality of care, but for compliance with the information security requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

For organizations to remain in compliance with HIPAA, records must be immutable and tamper-proof to a prevent data from being altered or deleted. Under HIPAA, data must be secure and private and auditors must be able to trace user access to patient records. Keeping older information in production and legacy applications is not compliant, cost-effective or scalable.

Runyon and other experts say that healthcare organizations should solve this patient information and archiving dilemma by seeking new technologies that will accomplish the following:

• Give staff a centralized way to manage patient data, which will reduce work, chaos and confusion.

• Protect an organization’s reputation for patient safety and quality by giving staff access to lifetime patient information.

• Centralize a solution that eliminates risk when it comes to information security compliance, including HIPAA.

• Give your organization a technology solution that provides for cost management on both the front and back ends.

You should “investigate legacy decommissioning and data vendors. These providers offer a variety of approaches—from hosting parts of or entire retired systems in their facilities to extracting and mapping the data to a repository or archive,” Runyon adds.

Retiring legacy applications will require collaboration across your healthcare organization, with clinicians and the IT team taking active roles.

“CIOs, CTOs, master data managers and compliance personnel should take every opportunity to reduce the amount of legacy data they maintain.” Barry Runyon, vice president of research at Gartner

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Your plan should include the following steps:

• Identify the stakeholders and establish an executive-level sponsor. Invite key representatives from the clinical, IT and security departments to join your core team.

• After determining the data that you want to archive, allow users an opportunity to review it and help identify any missing data.

• Identify source systems that you are planning to decommission, such as EMR systems, lab systems and systems that create documents or other forms of unstructured content.

• Estimate the costs associated with these systems, including licensing costs, server costs, storage costs and operational costs.

• Document the requirements for the new system you plan to implement, including the data, security and user experience aspects.

• Develop a strategy for extracting data from the source systems.

• Design or configure the user application for presenting the archived data.

• Extract the data from the source applications into a staging area. Validate that all the data has been completely and correctly archived.

• Test the system first with IT users. Then, in an effort to get their input and buy-in, allow the clinical users to try out the new system.

HOLISTIC APPROACH WITH EMC DOCUMENTATION CLINICAL ARCHIVING SOLUTION Clinicians and patients are the ultimate beneficiaries of an improved clinical archiving system. Clinicians need an integrated, 360-degree view of patient information, including medical history, medications, lab results, procedure notes, medical images, pathology reports and cardiology

tests. Getting a full picture of a patient’s care history improves diagnosis, treatment and overall patient safety.

The ability to access all known patient information will not only create a better overall care experience, but can also save costs for the healthcare organization, patients and other payers.

The EMC Documentation Clinical Archiving Solution is a holistic approach to archiving all forms of applications and information, both structured and unstructured. It gives users live, on-demand access to all archived patient records, documents and images, and eliminates the need to navigate multiple systems and user interfaces. Users are able to see a complete view of patient history, diagnosis and treatment at the point of care.”

The EMC Documentation Clinical Archiving Solution, which is an XML-based unified archive, is vendor-neutral, non-proprietary and can be scaled on the enterprise level. It also easily integrates with the EMR and offers a user-interface that allows for easy access, search and information download capabilities.

Also important is that the EMC solution is secure, immutable, auditable and ensures regulatory compliance needs.

“The legacy decommissioning problem has been accelerated by the increasing rate of automation within organizations, the adoption and optimization of electronic health record systems, the uptick in mergers, acquisitions, consolidation activity and other factors.” Barry Runyon, vice president of research at Gartner

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Having all of these features in a clinical archiving solution is critically important, since you need to “select a decommissioning vendor that offers a solution that can handle the most critical applications, systems and/or data in your legacy portfolio—and one you have the skills and resources to support,” Runyon says.

“The legacy decommissioning problem has been accelerated by the increasing rate of automation within organizations, the adoption and optimization of electronic health record systems, the uptick in mergers, acquisitions, consolidation activity and other factors. These drivers and the

increasing size of the legacy portfolio have begun to make legacy decommissioning a higher priority for CIOs,” Runyon adds.

The EMC solution allows you to retire obsolete legacy systems, while archiving information from multiple applications in one central location. Users get live access to information they need without having to log in to several systems.

Other features of the EMC Documentation Clinical Archiving Solution include the following:

• Because it is an open system based on xml, which conforms to the Open Archival Information System (OAIS)—instead of being constrained to fit a vendor’s proprietary model—the EMC solution allows your organization to design its own data model.

• The EMC solution is a capable of archiving all forms of medical database information, including clinical documents, medical images, voice recordings and print stream.

• It features a built-in Web application, API for user interface into existing business applications or portals and EMC authorization and access control.

• The system is vendor-neutral and nonproprietary, and eliminates need for data migrations.

And it’s fast. The system can access more than a billion records, with each one coming up in less than a second. n

EMC is a trusted healthcare solutions provider serving more than 5,000 healthcare customers worldwide. We provide purpose-built, healthcare-specific solutions that are developed and tested to work together seamlessly. And we’re meeting the healthcare industry’s challenges head on by transforming how enterprises view, organize, access, manage and use patient information to create efficiencies and optimize care delivery.

November 2014