Take Out IT Costs to Fuel World-class Care

As the cost of providing world-class healthcare continues to rise, healthcare organizations face ongoing challenges to support their patients, clinicians, and practitioners.

One of the biggest challenges that carries a significant underlying cost is in the management of patient data—from medical records that form a comprehensive view of patients’ medical history, to patients’ billing and payment records, and more.

Healthcare providers are squeezed between adopting new technologies, such as Epic and other systems that enable electronic medical records, to modern billing systems that streamline the financial operations of healthcare.

Add to this the ongoing pace of mergers and acquisitions, along with the consolidation of clinicians’ practices into larger organizations, and what results is often overlapping and sometimes silo’d systems that drive up the cost and complexity of delivering outstanding patient care.

In fact, in many organizations, more than half of the IT infrastructure is made up of aging legacy systems. These systems are often kept in read-only mode because healthcare organizations are subject to regulations that govern the access and retention of data on these systems.

Move Beyond a “Do-nothing” Strategy

Many organizations are stuck in a “do-nothing” mode in regards to legacy applications, often because it can seem easier to avoid dealing with a problem that has developed over time than proactively find a solution.

However, the drawback of maintaining legacy systems is that it can result in millions of dollars in annual maintenance fees. Plus, there’s dependence on fewer available staff who know how to operate these systems—not to mention the added risks should outdated, unsupported applications fail or become subject to viruses or intrusion.

The Solution: Application Decommissioning

Application Decommissioning with InfoArchive can take out the high costs of maintaining legacy applications while moving legacy data to a modern and easy-to-use platform that provides easy access to clinicians and best-in-class compliance capabilities.

Flatirons—a recognized expert in Application Decommissioning with InfoArchive—works with healthcare organizations across the country to identify legacy systems that are candidates for retirement, migrate the data to InfoArchive, and decommission the legacy applications.

We have helped acute care hospitals, academic medical centers, hospital networks, and national health systems develop and implement application retirement strategies using InfoArchive—migrating multiple terabytes of data from aging systems to the InfoArchive platform and saving millions of dollars in the process.

Applications we have retired include:

  • Patient information systems
  • Human Resources applications
  • Medical records systems
  • Billing statements applications
  • Explanation of benefits systems
  • And more

Application decommissioning projects are some of the most efficient IT projects that organizations can undertake, with most applications being retired in only a few months. More importantly, they can deliver millions of dollars in savings over several years.

Don’t let runaway IT costs slow down your ability to provide world-class care: retire your legacy applications to achieve considerable cost savings and free up resources to reinvest in strategic projects that contribute to world-class patient care.