By Julie Fouque, Vice President of Marketing
What do you do when your VP of technology says that one of your main areas of expertise is a dirty word?
You listen, learn, and act on the knowledge.
That’s the predicament I’ve been in with George Florentine, our vice president of technology. George has been the technical guru behind many of our data archiving and application initiatives. He’s provided leadership around data modeling, scaling, integration, and other aspects of archiving projects for years.
We’ve been riding the data archiving wave. Until now.
“’Data archiving’ is a market segment everyone understands,” George points out. “But what we’re interested in is giving more value to our customers around their content on aging and unsupported systems.”
He’s right. “Rather than think of archiving as moving data to a repository where you don’t have to touch it,” George says, “what we’re seeing is forward-thinking organizations―such as in healthcare―want to provide a 360-degree patient view, do analytics, improve patient outcomes, do predictive health, and so on. They need to be able to use data from legacy electronic health record (EHR) and revenue cycle management systems to do this.”
“We don’t think of it so much as archiving as adding value to legacy data.” – George Florentine, VP, Technology
“Our thinking is that there’s a lot of value in this legacy content. We can add value to the content by getting it into a consistent solution and integrating it with a hospital’s enterprise EHR, new pay cycle systems, and enterprise analytics initiatives.”
This is why “archiving” is a dirty word. Often data archiving projects focus only on the cost savings aspect of moving data from legacy systems to a consolidated repository in order to decommission the legacy systems (and eliminate hardware, software, and support costs).
But even greater value goes beyond this baseline use for archiving. Organizations who use their data strategically aren’t simply interested in archiving for the sake of archiving alone. They’re looking for solutions that help them use their legacy data to improve their products and services, gain a competitive edge, and impact their business results.
That’s a compelling reason to shift the conversation from archiving to strategic data management. And we’re glad to help.
