By Julie Fouque, VP of Marketing

Give someone a fish and they’ll eat for a day. Teach them how to fish and they’ll feed themselves for a lifetime.

The same concept holds true in data archiving and application decommissioning.

One healthcare network came to us with this specific request. Not only were they hungry (having an immediate need to decommission eight legacy systems) but they also knew they had an ongoing need to archive data from other legacy systems. Self-sufficiency to perform archiving and decommissioning was a central goal so they could meet future needs themselves.

So we designed a three-phase healthcare archiving solution for this multi-state integrated healthcare provider network with 30,000 employees at more than 600 locations. We call it a “teach to fish” engagement.

Phase One consisted of us archiving data from eight legacy systems. This included all extract, transform, and load work along with developing a set of utilities to speed up the process, implement a master patient index, and provide a single point of access to the archive from within their primary EHR (Epic) so users could access historical data from one place, no matter the original system.

During Phase Two, the knowledge transfer stage, we created in-depth training materials that documented the entire process. As part of the “teach to fish” engagement, we provided formal in-person training on all aspects of archiving and decommissioning. The hospital network’s team then worked with us side-by-side to archive data from a clinical and an accounting system.

With hands-on training under their belts, the client team now is in Phase Three, fishing for a lifetime—well equipped to perform the complete archiving and decommissioning process on other legacy systems already identified as well as for those that arise in the future.

When you read the case study, you’ll see that the organization achieved other notable returns on investment (ROI) from archiving data and decommissioning legacy systems: cost savings, reduced risk of data vulnerabilities, and greater ease in meeting compliance requirements. They also have boosted their clinicians’ ability to improve care through quick access to more complete patient information.

This type of engagement is what we enjoy most. Not only are we able to meet an immediate need for our client, but we are sharing the technical and project management knowledge so our clients can get critical data management work done themselves. Maybe our tagline should be “Learn to Fish!”