What better time to give back to the community than during the holidays? At Harmony Healthcare IT (HHIT) our team helped spread some local holiday cheer. . We caroled, as a company, at five assisted living centers and adopted three families with St. Vincent DePaul Society.

HHIT was happy to get in the holiday spirit, giving back and brightening the lives of others.

“Seeing the joy on the residents faces makes it all worth it . . . even if we can’t sing!,” says HHIT IT Analyst Hong Tran.  “They lit up as soon as we walked in the room.”

The South Bend, IN St. Vincent DePaul Society has a program setup to adopt families in need. This year we adopted three families, shopping for gifts that single parents and their children included on their wish-lists. Our employees donated time and money to provide for these families. As a team, we shopped, wrapped gifts and delivered food, clothing, toys and more.

“Being able to share in the process of wrapping and delivering gifts to our adopted families was a terrific experience and really helped me get into the Christmas spirit,” says Michael Hilton, HHIT Database Analyst. “The camaraderie of the team was on full display as we came together to give back to the community that has been so generous to us. ”

Thank you to our employees, friends, families and clients for making 2016 a great year.  We wish you nothing but the best this holiday season and into 2017.

Running a daily system backup to tapes is often routine for office managers. Although this method has worked for many years, it is not always the fastest option or even the most secure. Restoring critical patient information in today’s world is crucial and the quicker and more secure, the better.

More and more data storage technologies, often referred to as data vaults, are becoming available to medical practices. Because of this, many office administrators are considering strategies to further secure data both electronically and offsite. The result is a faster and more comprehensive restoration of patient data, especially in the event of a disaster. Sent straight to a secure data recovery center, the tape-less electronic backup is also compressed and encrypted.

There are several benefits of electronic data vaulting as opposed to tape backup. Some of which include:

• Ease and speed of recovery
• Speed of transmission
• Security
• Reduced Cost

How does tape backup compare to data vaulting?

Imagine that your Medical Manager^® server crashes, taking the application down. In the case of a tape back-up, prior to the more stringent HIPAA rules, you might overnight the media to your support provider so that data could be restored from backup. Today, to prevent protected health information breach, mailing the media or hard drive is not a safe option. Rather, a technician may need to be deployed onsite to restore the data or to pick up the media to work on restoration at the office. This adds to the system downtime and expenses involved in restoring the data. In the case of Data Vaulting, the support provider could restore the data remotely as it was backed up in a secure data center versus to tape and therefore is immediately accessible to technicians. The difference in restoring from these two backup scenarios range from weeks or days for restoration from backup to days or hours for restoration from data vaulting. That’s a large cost savings should restoration of data from backup be required.

A data vaulting solution saves your practice money. First, it replaces the hardware, software and tapes that come with the current tape backup system. Second,  data is compressed by almost 50%, which reduces overall storage costs.

If you are interested in learning more about electronic data vaulting for your medical practice, contact Harmony Healthcare IT. Your technical specifications can be reviewed and a solution for the new year can be discussed and implemented by the end of 2016.

Nearly 500 health information technology organizations join forces this week to celebrate National Health IT Week. For the past decade, the event has grown to showcase how health information technology improves the quality of healthcare delivery, increases patient safety and decreases medical errors.

We believe there are five main reasons to celebrate Health IT Week:

1. Innovations – Utilizing information technology in healthcare is all about innovation. From the advent of the electronic health record (EHR), to sensors and wearable devices that help monitor a patient’s condition and provide analytics, there are numerous innovations that are reasons to celebrate! Check out a recent Wall Street Journal interview of Susannah Fox, Chief Technology Officer for the Department of Health and Human Services and her thoughts on creating a culture of innovation.

2. Access – Information IS power. Having access to a complete patient narrative can help improve patient care and ultimately save lives. Our application, Health Data Archiver (HDA), is a lightweight, vendor and system neutral record storage solution that leads the industry in providing access to historical health information. By making this historical data readily available to caregivers, we’re helping to support fully-informed, proper treatment decisions. This is especially important in the cases of mental health and oncology, when having a comprehensive context of care history could make a world of difference. Clinicians who have access to HDA appreciate having a full patient narrative available with just a click of a button. HIM teams appreciate the smooth and seamless process for historical records management, release of information requests and that records are consolidated into one place for easy access. Check out some of our resources for more information.
3. Standards – The evolving HIPAA requirements and technology advances lead to stricter standards and compliance issues for healthcare organizations. We see this as a good thing as pushing the envelope for greater healthcare outcomes through the use of information technology is what gets us really excited. We relish the opportunity to support our clients with solutions to support the long-term EHR storage and retrieval process. This also makes the legal teams happy as they need to be ready for eDiscovery and to meet compliance requirements around many turns. Check out our recent webinar about eDiscovery and healthcare record retention.
4. Cost Savings – We love saving our clients money, especially when that also includes providing improved access to their complete library of legacy electronic health records. A solid, secure archive saves money due to decreased maintenance costs, less IT labor required to maintain old systems and the overall streamlining of the legacy IT portfolio and supporting infrastructure. Read our blog on five things to expect when archiving legacy systems.
5. Improved Outcomes – Our mission is to preserve vital information so that lives may be improved. This mission, and the work all healthcare IT organizations complete during every week of the year, is the most important reason to celebrate National Health IT Week. It also motivates our team to continue to evolve our products and services to utilize technology solutions to help save lives. Check out a recent post by our CEO, Tom Liddell.

So, join us in celebrating #NHITWeek.  We’re advocates of health IT and we hope you are too.  Health IT helps ensure that patients get appropriate, high-quality care when and where they need it, and, we like that.  Contact Harmony Healthcare IT for more information about our data management services and Health Data Archiver.

College students looking for a technical job with a growing company in a booming industry should visit Harmony Healthcare IT (HHIT) at the Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Career Connection Stem Career Fair on Thursday, September 29^th at the IUPUI Career Connection building in downtown Indianapolis from 11am- 3pm.

About Harmony Healthcare IT
Since 2006, health IT analysts at Harmony Healthcare IT have extracted demographic, financial, clinical and administrative data from hundreds of healthcare providers – both ambulatory and acute. Headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, the company’s mission is to preserve vital information that will improve lives.  Harmony Healthcare IT employs experts in data extraction, migration, retention, integration and analytics to provide its clients with trusted solutions. Working with hundreds of systems, billions of records and terabytes of data, Harmony Healthcare IT — with its product, Health Data Archiver — provides clients with access to historical records.

About our Open Positions:  Business Analyst and Database Analyst
HHIT is currently seeking qualified candidates for our business analyst and database analyst positions. Both roles align with our mission of preserving vital information to save lives. Analysts work right along-side the team’s senior-level technicians to help make historical medical records readily accessible. The database analysts work with a team of data experts who focus on data mining, mapping and archiving strategies that make sense for the healthcare landscape of today… and tomorrow.

Comments from our Full-Time Hires
“It was the perfect opportunity to put the problem solving skills I had learned in college to use in a practical situation.”

“As Harmony continues to grow to meet the challenges of ransomware and cyber-security threats, I will be able to continue to sharpen my skills and become a better analyst.”

About the IUPUI Career Connection Stem Career Fair
This premiere event is a great venue for students and employers to connect. The 2015 event had 86 companies and over 700 students in attendance. Employers will be seeking students and graduates for internships, co-ops, and full-time positions.

Contact Harmony Healthcare IT
HHIT travels to local college campuses frequently, meeting new students and recruiting potential candidates for entry-level positions from all departments of the company. Are you interested in applying for one of these positions or learning more? If so, contact us.

Harmony Healthcare IT (HHIT) joins 440 health information technology organizations this week to raise awareness of the benefits that health information technology (IT) brings to U.S. healthcare. Since 2006, National Health IT Week (September 26-30, 2016) has served as the premier event to showcase how health information technology improves the quality of healthcare delivery, increases patient safety, decreases medical errors and strengthens the interaction between patients and healthcare providers.

HHIT employees will celebrate their collective contributions to the industry with several internal events. The week will conclude with a move to a larger office, still in South Bend, to support the company’s continued growth as a leading electronic health record extraction, migration and archiving solutions provider.

As EHR systems continue to be upgraded and older systems are retired, there is a need for smooth and accurate data migrations, expertly decommissioned legacy systems and secure archives that provide access to historical records from multiple former data sources. The company’s flagship, Health Data Archiver (HDA) is one reason to celebrate. The pioneering archiving innovation is a light-weight application that is database and vendor neutral.

“Our team has archived millions of patient records and terabytes of data in a very systematic way that leads the industry and helps achieve our mission: to preserve vital information so that lives may be improved,” explains Tom Liddell, CEO and Managing Partner of Harmony Healthcare IT. “We securely save the complete patient narrative and support eDiscovery of health and other information that may be needed for 25 years or more. Equally important, we continue to push forward to conceptualize data mining, mapping and archiving strategies for the ever evolving healthcare landscape.”

Harmony Healthcare IT supports comprehensive health care reform which is not possible without system-wide adoption of health information technology. With Meaningful Use now providing the way forward, eligible providers across the country increasingly understand the benefits for themselves and their patients, and are adopting Meaningful Use compliant electronic health records.

About National Health Information Technology Week

Now in its eleventh year, National Health IT Week is a collaborative forum assembling key healthcare constituents —vendors, provider organizations, payers, pharmaceutical/biotech companies, government agencies, industry/professional associations, research foundations, and consumer protection groups —working together to elevate national attention to the necessity of advancing health IT. Log onto www.healthitweek.org for more information.

Although Colleen Dalton hadn’t studied healthcare in her coursework, she spent the summer of 2015 interning for the Harmony Healthcare IT (HHIT) marketing department.  That role extended to a remote part-time position throughout her senior year until she officially joined the company as Marketing Coordinator in May of 2016, days after graduating from IU with a degree in Management and Business.

“I jumped in and worked on whatever was needed,” says Colleen. “I made hundreds of cold calls and helped manage the customer relationship management system.  This was the best way to soak up new information.”

Interns like Colleen join all facets of the organization, from administrative roles to database and systems analyst positions.  They gain practical work experience in health information technology, focusing primarily on the secure management and storage of clinical data with the company’s product, Health Data Archiver.

“We’re looking for capable students who are willing to learn from the ground up,” says Shannon Larkin, VP of Marketing & Business Development.  “By starting on the phones to generate leads, Colleen quickly immersed into a new industry.  She learned the language of our prospects and gained a solid understanding the technical workflows that support our sales and marketing efforts.  Today, she’s managing lead distribution, generating departmental metrics, posting blog content, managing our social media channels and coordinating webinar and tradeshow logistics.”

Colleen says the HHIT team makes it obvious it wants each and every employee to succeed.  “There are endless opportunities at this young and growing company,” she adds. “That makes this a great first job out of college.”

Three big things Colleen learned from her internship:

1. Reaching out for help – I knew little to nothing about health information technology when I started, so, right away, I learned it was okay to ask for help. I asked a lot of questions to make sure I fully understood my objectives. That quickly led to me managing tasks on my own.

2. Communicating well – In order to be successful in the work world, you need to be able to communicate with others. It was necessary to have an open flow of communication to make sure everyone was on the same page and things were going as planned.

3. Being a team player – I learned that even though everyone works together, we each have our own role within the organization. Some tasks may seem much smaller than others, but each is extremely important in order for the company to run smoothly.

Colleen on the future of healthcare technology
Health IT is growing by the minute. There are endless opportunities for expansion. This is a great industry to be involved in as it is something that will always be necessary.

Colleen on her career goals
As I’m pushed to explore new areas outside my comfort zone, I expand my horizons.  Right now, I appreciate the opportunity to learn and grow.  That is what will help me determine my long-term career goals.

Colleen on South Bend as a place to live and work
Besides my time at IU, I have lived in South Bend since the day I was born. My mom owns a breakfast restaurant downtown, so, I’ve grown up with a great appreciation for this community. I enjoy South Bend.  There are always familiar faces and lots of ways to get involved.

Talk to us!  Are you looking for an internship or full-time position in healthcare IT?  Let’s get the conversation started. Contact us and we’ll be in touch.

Jeff is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who has worked in emergency psychiatric services for the past 21 years. He received his MSW from Portland State University and his Master of Divinity from The University of Notre Dame. His Master of Divinity Thesis titled, “Healthcare of the Poor” has kept him attuned to ethical issues in the healthcare arena. He has been consulting for Harmony Healthcare IT and continues to provide psychiatric services.

Supporting articles by Jeff:

• Why Healthcare Technology Innovation Must Consider the Patient Story
• The Connection between Interoperability and Legacy Data
• The Race of Technology vs. Patient Care: Preserving the Context of Medical Decision-Making in Behavioral Health

Get in touch with Jeff today to learn more about his expertise in healthcare IT.

The Organization

Parkview Health is a not-for-profit, community-based health system serving northeast Indiana and northwest Ohio. With more than 9,700 employees, Parkview is the region’s largest employer with nine hospitals and a network of primary care and specialty physicians.

The Situation

In 2011, Parkview installed Epic. Its migration to a single-platform electronic health record (EHR) displaced about 50 clinical applications from over a dozen vendors. With so many legacy systems in its portfolio, the organization contracted with an EMR archiving vendor to archive its first acute care system and provide access to the legacy data. Parkview soon learned that the vendor was not equipped to manage the project. The organization was not pleased with the process, the time frame or the end product. As a result, Parkview went back to the drawing board to find EHR archive vendors better suited to meet their objectives of complying with medical record retention regulations and reducing legacy system maintenance costs. In doing so, Parkview Health also realized it needed to establish a standard process for archiving.

“Our archiving project is back on track now, moving forward with success because of Harmony Healthcare IT. The Harmony team has the highest level of integrity as well as a real interest in our company. We share a common goal of success, which is my definition of a true partnership. Parkview has learned to include archiving in every future endeavor. Archiving now is a part of life, and the process developed by Harmony Healthcare IT has become our de facto standard.”

The Solution

In its second attempt to archive patient data, Parkview contracted with Harmony Healthcare IT (HHIT), a technology firm with a mission to improve lives by preserving vital information. With its people, process and technology engineered to support a consultative approach to health data management, HHIT readily assessed Parkview’s disparate data stores and went to work on its first archive project. Successful in that execution, HHIT quickly got Parkview’s archive initiative back on track and then recommended a comprehensive long-term strategy to consolidate the remainder of the legacy systems.

Archive Benefits

Consolidation of Parkview’s legacy data into a single, vendorneutral, easy-to-use archive solution has yielded many benefits, which include:

• Bypassing the complexity of a data conversion
• Eliminating support costs and the burden of maintaining legacy systems
• Showing a return on investment at 18-months
• Complying with HIPAA privacy and security regulations
• Deploying a virtualized solution into an existing infrastructure (can also be remotely-hosted)
• Keeping recurring costs down via an open source architecture
• Accessing or printing entire historical records with ease
• Providing a repository for both discrete data elements and scanned documents
• Relying on a single, dependable vendor, HHIT, for the extraction, and archival of data

Parkview Health Lessons Learned

• It is important to vet out and choose an EMR archiving vendor that can manage the scope of the project.
• It is critical to consider archiving early on in the EHR implementation process as a built-in step, especially when acquiring/ merging with new practices.
• Archive sooner rather than later. If you wait to archive older systems, you risk losing subject matter experts. Plus, legacy systems are costly to maintain and vulnerable for technical failures.
• While there may not be a lot of glory in archiving, the data is important, legally necessary to keep and could save lives.

For a printable version of this case study, click here.

About Harmony Healthcare IT

Since 2006, health IT analysts at Harmony Healthcare IT have extracted demographic, financial, clinical and administrative data from more than 500 healthcare systems – both ambulatory and acute. Headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, the company employs experts in data extraction, migration, archival, integration and analytics to provide its clients with trusted solutions. Working with hundreds of systems, billions of records and terabytes of data, Harmony Healthcare IT provides clients with access to historical records. Simply.

Contact Harmony Healthcare IT

To learn more about how we can help with your healthcare organization’s legacy EMR or ERP system decommissioning, contact Harmony Healthcare IT .

Harmony Healthcare IT (HHIT) today announced the appointment of Pam Paris Ph.D., PMP as the Director of Product Management and Development. In this new role, Dr. Paris is charged with advancing the company’s software application, Health Data Archiver.  Health Data Archiver is a secure and searchable archive used by healthcare organizations nationwide to ensure HIPAA-compliant, long-term storage of protected patient and employee information.   The product is utilized at hospitals and clinics when one system (i.e., electronic medical record or enterprise resource planning) is replaced with another.

Dr. Paris joins the HHIT team as a well-rounded information technology professional.  Her 20+ years of experience leading product innovation efforts for numerous healthcare organizations provides significant product management and industry expertise. At HHIT, Dr. Paris will facilitate communication between customers and technical teams and then align the efforts needed to create and enhance Health Data Archiver as well as related data management services that make information available to healthcare professionals who need it, when they need it.  The ultimate mission for Dr. Paris and her team is to improve the lives of patients by making the full patient history readily available to providers at time of care when the comprehensive narrative could change the course of treatment.

“Healthcare organizations constantly are evolving and upgrading to newer systems,” says Dr. Paris. “This creates a huge need for smooth and accurate data migrations, expertly decommissioned legacy systems and secure archives that provide access to historical records from multiple former data stores.”

Dr. Paris’ job is about more than data and launching the next version of a product. It’s about creating tools and processes to help healthcare organizations evaluate their information technology needs and develop data management strategies that truly work.

“Our company is uniquely positioned,” Dr. Paris says.  “Our team has the in-house technical expertise, clinical experience and innovation to help our customers streamline the landscape of their IT portfolio while also making historical data readily available.  Our data views and product workflows for health information management and clinical resources are particularly effective, efficient and seamlessly integrated to the leading electronic health record platforms.”

Throughout her career, Dr. Paris has helped pioneer many ground-breaking projects including a security review initiative for a major electronic health record vendor. This unique initiative walked customers through an innovative wizard-style program to evaluate their HIPAA security strengths and weaknesses and concluded with an actionable report that could be used to satisfy an audit.  This project and others on her resume are highly relevant to her product development work today with Health Data Archiver.

“Pam’s wealth of experience and industry knowledge has already made her a strong addition to our team,” said Jim Hammer, VP of Product & Program Management at HHIT.  “Hiring her into this role demonstrates our commitment to expanding and refining our product as we continue to grow the company.  She fits our culture of innovation and exceptional service.  I am confident Pam will provide and implement high quality solutions for our existing and future clients.”

Dr. Paris holds a Ph.D. in Mental Health Counseling and a B.S. in Business Education from the University of Florida. She has numerous industry certifications including: Certified Security Compliance Specialist (CSCS), Certified HIPAA Professional (CHP), Project Management Professional – PMP, Epic Ambulatory Order Transmittal Masters, Epic Ambulatory Healthcare Software and NextGen Certified Professional – EHR/ICS NCP.

About Harmony Healthcare IT – Since 2006, health IT analysts at Harmony Healthcare IT have extracted demographic, financial, clinical and administrative data from hundreds of healthcare providers – both ambulatory and acute. Headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, the company’s mission is to preserve vital information that will improve lives.  Harmony Healthcare IT employs experts in data extraction, migration, retention, integration and analytics to provide its clients with trusted solutions. Working with hundreds of systems, billions of records and terabytes of data, Harmony Healthcare IT — with its product, Health Data Archiver — provides clients with access to historical records. Simply.

The Harmony Healthcare IT (HHIT) team supports about 3,000 providers on The Medical Manager^® software. On a percentage basis, that’s a pretty good portion of the users still scheduling and billing with Medical Manager today. These are providers that sought us out to provide support for one of a few reasons:

• they were not satisfied with the service they were getting from alternative vendors
• they did not want to invest to upgrade or change systems just to meet industry mandates
• they did not want to be forced to use one particular claims clearinghouse to send claims and patient statements (due to features, support issues or cost)

So, what makes HHIT different as a support provider? Our people.

There are certain attributes we look for in every hire we make—positivity, patience, and problem solving. If we’re certain these attributes exist in each of our employees who man our 800-number, then, we’re certain you’ll have an above average experience with our help desk when you call. We strive to provide personalized support services for every “how to” Medical Manager question, every system error and every claims clearinghouse challenge.

Feedback that we’ve received from our clients suggest that we’re delivering on our brand promise of “relationships, responsiveness, results.”

Jeff Yanasak, from Top Tier IT out of Fort Myers, FL, recently relayed to us some kudos for Todd Porter, an HHIT support technician. “Todd is amazing,” Yanasak says. “He provides premier support. We really enjoy working with him and would recommend him and Harmony Healthcare IT.”

Another accolade came in about Gail Hearne, one of HHITs senior application specialists. Previous co-owner and president of Direct Billing Associates, Marilyn Smith, out of Auburndale, MA wrote “Gail was absolutely a life-saver on so many occasions. She always followed through, answered our questions quickly and was incredible!” Smith went on to add “We have been in business for 23 years, and Harmony Healthcare IT and Gail Hearne were the best choices we ever made for support.”

Personalized and quality service is provided from people who possess the attributes we look for in each of our hires. They understand the industry, the technical challenges and – perhaps most importantly – they know how critical it is to resolve issues so that you can get on with your day and tend to patients.

At Harmony Healthcare IT, we are fortunate to have senior analysts on our team with over twenty years of technical experience and application competency. Our resources are on-call, 24/7, to support your needs. The results they deliver keep your cash flowing and your patient information secure – all at an affordable rate.

For more information about improving patient collections, please contact Harmony Healthcare IT, the makers of Health Data Archiver.