During the past few years, Flatirons has worked with a number of healthcare organizations to archive data from outdated accounting, human resources, and clinical systems to a modern and consolidated repository. Data archiving helps healthcare providers retire costly legacy systems, recoup budget, and improve their ability to comply with data management regulations.
Data archiving and application decommissioning projects are typically pursued following mergers and acquisitions or in conjunction with data center consolidation or other IT modernization projects.
These projects can result in millions of dollars of savings over several years because they eliminate ongoing maintenance, staffing, and other costs associated with aging systems.
While many organizations’ primary motivation for data archiving and application decommissioning is financial, the benefits extend to clinicians and healthcare information management (HIM) staff as well.
Clinicians: No More Frustrating Searches
Often, our clients are in the process of adopting a modern EHR or have recently completed an EHR implementation. While they’re focused on rolling out the new system, they may not be thinking about what they’re going to do with clinical information on legacy systems.
Flatirons Digital Hub for Healthcare addresses this. By archiving data from legacy EHRs to one repository that complements your production system, clinicians can easily search the archive for all historical records associated with a particular patient.
Using any Web browser, clinicians can log on to your archive to access historical patient data. They can look up patients, and the system shows a dashboard with categories of information into which they can drill down. The dashboard is customizable and can contain categories such as immunizations, medications, family history, or others that you identify.
Clinicians also can see patients’ records in chronological order. The system can integrate with your current EHR so that if a clinician is using that system, he or she can automatically access historical patient records without changing systems.
What’s in it for HIM?
HIM staff get something out of clinical archiving with Flatirons Digital Hub for Healthcare as well. HIM staff can easily search for patient and provider records to respond timely to release of information (ROI) requests, audits, and litigation events. They can export ROI packages to electronic and printable PDFs and also see the history of ROI packages created.
One of our clients saved more than $1 million in the first phase of their archiving and retirement project alone, with clinicians reporting that clinical archiving made their work considerably easier.
Take a look at this short video to learn more about Flatirons Digital Hub for Healthcare. Your motivation to cut costs for legacy systems could bring a welcome new tool to clinicians and HIM staff.
