Harmony Healthcare IT (HHIT) Business Development leaders Shannon Larkin and Scott Kidder spoke last month at the Michigan Association of Community Mental Health Boards’ “Improving Outcomes, Finance & Quality through Integrated Information” Conference. Their session, entitled “Records Retention,” focused on requirements and options for preserving mental health patient records, which is one of the most stringent record retention areas due to the personal nature of the protected information for a patient.

The conference and topic is timely as healthcare providers work to provide better care for the nearly 43.6 million adults in the United States with a mental health condition. These conditions include depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress. This number represents 18.1% of all U.S. adults, according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

The Many Layers of Record Retention Laws At a Federal level, electronic health records (EHRs) are governed by HIPAA and Medicare rules which require six years of preservation. Additionally, each state has its own set of retention mandates  spanning from 7 to 10 or even 25 years depending on facility type. By the time you drop to an agency or, in this case, a medical specialty level, the record may need to be stored into perpetuity.

Some healthcare delivery organizations are deciding to simply keep patient data forever. Storage costs continue to go down and the value of the historical data continues to go up. This could be particularly true for mental health patient records as the comprehensive narrative record and integrity of a mental health record is of utmost importance.

Archiving Today Offers Many Benefits

Healthcare organizations that need to preserve legacy PHI and other medical records are relying on software-neutral archives, like Health Data Archiver from Harmony Healthcare IT. Mental health providers will appreciate specific benefits of an archive, including:

• HIPAA-Compliant (Security, Encryption, Audit Logs, etc.)
• Role-based User Security
• Simple eDiscovery and Release of Information for HIM
• Ability to Note/Addend
• Multi-Data Source (Scalable)
• Light-weight Deployment (Browser, No client software to load)

Big Picture Benefits

In general, archives deliver many enterprise-wide benefits, including:

Cost Reduction – Streamlining the long-term storage of historical PHI now will save money in the long-run. Not only will it reduce costs paid for the support and technical maintenance of an antiquated system, but, it will save on training new staff on how to access information over the next 7-25 years.

Eliminating Risk – Preserving historical patient data is the responsibility of every provider. As servers and operating systems age they become more prone to data corruption or loss. The archival of patient data to a simplified and more stable storage solution ensures long-term access to the right information when it’s needed for an audit or legal inquiry. Incorporating a data archive also avoids the costly and cumbersome task of a full data conversion.

Compliance – Providers are required to have data for nearly a decade or more past the date of service. Check with your legal counsel, HIM Director, medical society or AHIMA on medical record retention requirements that affect the facility type or practice specialty in your state.

Simplified Access To Data – We all want data at the touch of a button. Gone are the days of storing historical patient printouts in a binder or inactive medical charts in a basement or storage unit. By scanning and archiving medical documents, data and images, the information becomes immediately accessible to those who need it.

Merging Data Silos – Decades worth of data from disparate legacy software applications is archived for immediate access via any browser-based workstation or device. Also, medical document scanning and archiving provides access to patient paper charts.

Bottom line, a well-built mental health patient records archive will securely store legacy mental health data for long-term, easy access. Only one application is needed to access data from legacy systems that now can be decommissioned to further reduce software support and hardware costs. In most cases, complete ROI is within 18-24 months. While the cost and operational efficiencies make a lot of business sense, the true value of having access to a comprehensive and complete mental health record is priceless.

Contact Harmony Healthcare IT, makers of Health Data Archiver for more information.

The easier it is for patients to make payments, the more likely they are to pay providers, and the sooner too. Collecting more money, faster, helps increase overall revenue.

In healthcare, “increasing patient responsibility” and “high-deductible health plans” are huge buzz phrases. The reason is that, today, patients are more directly responsible than they have been ever before for paying their healthcare expenses.

According to Elizabeth Woodcock, a nationally recognized revenue cycle expert, “From 2007 through 2012, patients’ self-pay responsibility nearly tripled, rising from an average of 12 percent of practice revenue to just over 30 percent.” This means that, in order to remain profitable, practices need to be able to collect their patients’ financial payments one way or another. (source: ZirMed).

Our cloud-based claims management partner, ZirMed^®, continues to offer new services aimed at optimizing the financial performance of a medical practice. ZirMed’s Patient Payments solution offers several forms of payment, as well as options on how to accept these payments. Patient Payments creates an electronic receipt for each transaction that can be printed or provided to the patient through e-mail.

Using ZirMed’s Patient Payments solution has several benefits:

-Increase your collection rates by making it easier for patients to pay their obligations
-Improve staff productivity due to more efficient payment processing and card on file capability
-Reduce expenses by auto-posting patient payments, outsourcing low-value tasks, and benefiting from Patient Payments’ lower cost and feature rich, virtual terminal
-Improve internal controls for detailed reporting, audit trails, and more

For more information about improving patient collections, please contact Harmony Healthcare IT, the makers of Health Data Archiver. Or, watch our 30 minute webinar recording on the topic.

Rural Report: Improving Access to Healthcare Data for all Hoosiers

While 8 out of 10 small, rural and critical access hospitals have adopted basic EHR, these healthcare operations continue to have significantly lower basic EHR adoption rates compared to all hospitals.

Source: http://dashboard.healthit.gov/quickstats/quickstats.php

“Rural health data management solutions are important so all patients can benefit from readily available clinical data no matter how rural of an environment they are in,” says Tom Liddell, CEO of Harmony Healthcare IT.  Liddell will become Board President for the Indiana Rural Health Association (IRHA) at its annual conference June 21-22.

The 2016 IRHA conference: “Rural Health: Align, Connect, Engage” brings together physicians, nurses, pharmacists, public health professionals, and other rural health practitioners and advocates with residents of rural communities. Practitioners from the field and national experts discuss current topics, as well as share the experiences of others in public health and rural health care delivery, along with the latest information regarding the start-up and on-going management of rural health care delivery models. For more information on the conference, visit the website.

Liddell and his team of health data analysts at Harmony Healthcare IT have developed several solutions to provide complete and simple access to historical records.  This includes a data availability platform, an interoperability strategy and a browser-based, HIPAA-compliant legacy data storage solution called Health Data Archiver. The team works to extract, migrate and retain electronic medical records (EMRs) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for hundreds of ambulatory and acute healthcare settings, including rural sites, around the country.

“We want to empower the healthcare providers in our great state to improve Hoosier health,” says Liddell.  “Our data management solutions provide access to a more complete patient narrative.  That’s important to the health and economics of our state and our country.  Preservation and ready availability of vital information that tells the patient’s story is our mission.”

Liddell brings more than 25 years of health information management experience to the IRHA. Prior to his role as CEO at Harmony Healthcare IT he held senior management positions at South Bend Medical Foundation, Michiana Health Information Network, Web MD and Systems Management, Inc.

About Indiana Rural Health Association

The Indiana Rural Health Association (IRHA) is a not-for-profit organization representing a diverse statewide membership consisting of individuals and organizations committed to the improvement of health and resources for rural Hoosiers. IRHA seeks to provide a meaningful forum for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the health and safety of rural communities in Indiana. IRHA seeks to provide educational programs that focus on the unique needs of the residents of rural Indiana and the providers who serve them. IRHA also works to educate the public on relevant issues and focus unified efforts to bring about the necessary changes in public and private policies to ensure that all rural Hoosiers have access to quality health care in their own communities. More information about the IRHA can be accessed through the IRHA website.

In a recent study of electronic health record (EHR) system buyers, 2015 marked the first time the number of clinicians looking to replace an existing EMR outnumbered the number of clinicians looking to purchase an EHR for the first time. Merger and acquisition is often a leading cause of system replacement due to the cost and liability of running two systems. Further, the number of buyers replacing existing EHR software has increased 59 percent since 2014—implying that many EHR products are failing to meet physicians’ needs.

Even market leading EMR vendors like Allscripts are being replaced. With record first quarter bookings of $252 million, it’s no secret that Allscripts is a market leader. But, many of the nearly 180,000 physicians, 45,000 physician offices and 2,500 hospitals that utilize Allscripts products are finding that there are times when these systems get replaced, requiring EMR conversion and migration.

One such example is Torrance Health Association, a Management Service Organization (MSO) that provides practice management and administrative support services for 100 physician group practices with more than 350 support staff across 22 locations in southern California. Torrance Health Association implemented a new EMR that replaced five Allscripts Misys systems as well as one Practice Partners system from McKesson.

Patient data from the six legacy systems was archived to consolidate the historical data store, making each data source easily accessible to users within the MSO. “The entire archiving process was convenient and easy,” says Barry Sheppard, Senior Director of Information Systems at Torrance Health Association, in a recent case study of the project. “[The decommissioning of legacy systems and archival of patient data] positions us well for future growth as more practices join the network and we standardize on a go forward EHR system.”

Should your healthcare delivery system have an existing EMR that has been or is slated to be replaced for one reason or another, investigate patient data archiving as an alternative to a costly and complex data conversion. Contact the data experts at Harmony Healthcare IT, the makers of Health Data Archiver, to learn more about a streamlined methodology for securing patient data from any EMR or ERP system into an easy-to-access archive for compliance with state record retention mandates.

When Aurora Health Care in Wisconsin made a shift in its EMR system from Cerner Millennium to Epic, they faced 32 terabytes of legacy records, 75 terabytes of images and 34 million scanned documents  — all of which needed to be retained.  For a solution, Aurora turned to the archiving experts at Harmony Healthcare IT to get the help they needed to decommission its Cerner system.

Access this Case Study in .pdf format

The Organization

Aurora Health Care is a large private not-for-profit integrated provider in the Midwest. More than $4 billion in annual revenue from 15 hospitals, 159 clinic sites and 70 retail pharmacies. It has more than 1.2 million unique patients with 7.8 million patient encounters annually. The organization includes 31,000 caregivers and 1,700 employed physicians.

The Situation

Migrating from Cerner to Epic, the health system was under a time crunch to decommission Cerner as its AIX/Oracle 8 platform was coming to end-of-life on support. In addition, the system retirement would return a significant savings on system maintenance costs and IT labor burden, both of which were being re-directed to the Epic implementation. The requirements of the project were to:

• retain 100% of the patient care and system audit information for an indefinite number of years
• access historical records via a user interface that minimized training requirements as the user base was focused on learning how to use Epic
• preserve user access levels, ensuring ready and secure enterprise-wide accessibility to historical records
• ensure the capability to efficiently respond to release of information requests

The Project Scope

Solution

The Harmony Healthcare IT team analyzed the record retention policy, gathered cross-departmental system requirements and put the right resources in place to comprehensively archive all of the legacy data.

The Services Provided

• Retention Consulting Services
• Data Extraction
• Data Migration
• Data Harmonization
• Data Scrubbing
• Data Validation
• Reporting
• Support

The Results

The project was completed on time and on budget within 12 months from signature. There were 6,358 active users at the time of transition. Today, there are about 2,000 named users total, 650 of which login concurrently each day.

• Return on Investment – less than 12 months
• Integrity of Archived Data – data required for full compliance with audits or litigation was maintained
• User Access Roles/Privileges – respected in the archive, including historical chart access
• Clinical Context – user views and custom tabs preserved and applied in the archive
• User Accounts – simple account provisioning and clean up
• Existing Reports – clinical and administrative reports and data extracts ported over to the archive (i.e., chart access reports to information security, account provisioning/de-provisioning processes)
• No Changes to External Dependencies – external systems and processes that relied on Cerner data continue to receive the information in original format

“Our archive is an enterprise-wide win that exceeds our expectations. The solution is smart. The training was simple. The customer service is excellent.  Mission accomplished.”  — Vince Trier, Director IT Applications for Aurora Healthcare

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 Cerner decommissioning or Cerner to Epic EMR migration, contact Harmony Healthcare IT .

© 2015 Harmony Healthcare IT. All rights reserved. Cerner Millennium is a registered trademark of Cerner Corporation.

A team of Harmony Healthcare IT (HHIT) employees and their families participated in a walk on Saturday, April 23rd to support the National Kidney Foundation.

The walk took place in Mishawaka, IN and the HHIT team raised $3,760 which added to the overall total of $34,205 raised by this local-area event.

A special thanks goes out to our employees and family members for joining 100,000 other walkers nation wide to support such a great cause.

There are 26 million Americans with kidney disease.  To learn more about kidney disease, its prevention and organ donation & transplantation, visit the National Kidney Foundation website.

“Accurate Information, Quality Care,” is a fitting theme for the 2016 Health Information Professionals (HIP) week, April 3-9, 2016.  As the proliferation of health data continues to increase at exponential rates, it is more important than ever to have a laser focus on health data accuracy to help ensure quality care.

Harmony Healthcare IT appreciates Health Information Management (HIM) professionals this week and always!

Our team, the makers of Health Data Archiver, works with HIM professionals daily to manage the consolidation, security and integrity of legacy healthcare data. HIM Directors are integral players on the data governance teams of our clients and key advocates for keeping the complete patient story not only to meet medical record retention requirements but also to ensure that the full narrative is available to provide better care.  Many of our product features regarding the ease with which data is eDiscoverable and the workflows for how requests for information are fulfilled and documented have come from HIM professionals nationwide.

“We are already seeing HIM professionals leading the industry in achieving data integrity through information governance and ensuring patients and consumers have access to timely information they can trust,” said American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) CEO, Lynne Thomas Gordon in a recent press release. “This year’s HIP Week theme reflects our commitment to our vision of a world where the right information is available to the right person at the right time—for better care.”

Harmony Healthcare IT appreciates the efforts that AHIMA is making this week to visit Capitol Hill to share the importance of advancing HIM with government leaders seeking expertise and counsel on key issues including information governance, privacy, security, fraud and abuse.

About AHIMA

The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) represents more than 103,000 health information professionals in the United States and around the world. AHIMA is committed to promoting and advocating for research, best practices and effective standards in health information and to actively contributing to the development and advancement of health information professionals worldwide. AHIMA’s enduring goal is quality healthcare through quality information. ahima.org

To learn more about how your healthcare organization can consolidate legacy data stores of protected health information from both acute and ambulatory out-of-production EHRs, visit our resources page for videos, white papers, case studies and more.

Medical groups are unseating hospitals as the most sought after merger and acquisition targets, according to a report by consulting company Accenture.  The report forecasts that only eight percent of M&A deals between 2015 and 2018 will be hospital related, while 84 percent will be for non-acute providers (and the remaining eight percent for digital tools).

What does this mean for the IT department?

Merger and acquisition has a major impact on the IT department of a health system, especially if multiple ambulatory sites will be acquired annually.  Plans must be made to integrate the practice management (PM), electronic health record (EHR), general ledger and other business systems from the newly-acquired entities into the existing infrastructure, or, to retire them.  More often than not, plans are put in place to bring the staff from the acquired practice live on the go-forward EHR for the health system.  A simple demographic data conversion that might include some key clinical data is performed.  A period of time is then allowed for the legacy practice management system accounts receivables to be run down.  After that, the data must be archived and the old PM/EHR systems decommissioned.

Legacy medical data management tips for IT during mergers and acquisitions 

1. Use a team approach.  Involve the appropriate departmental resources at your organization early on in the migration planning process.  Get data governance buy-in and planning input from clinicians, HIM resources, legal, revenue cycle management and compliance.  Acknowledge early on that not every data point should be migrated to the go-forward EHR.  Have a plan that includes what to do with the remaining clinical or financial data.  This will likely include archival to a HIPAA-compliant storage area so that future requests for information can be fulfilled.
2. Consider patient matching.  Patient matching isn’t a fully automated event. It is best to assign a resource(s) to clean up duplicate records prior to migration for better results. Determine which field(s) to use as a match. While you shouldn’t expect a 100% match, your results will be higher if this pre-work is completed prior to the migration. Utilizing a third-party resource to do this work can keep the project on time and on budget.
3. Involve an expert consulting/migration vendor team.  Aggressive M&A strategies may require input from a third-party who can ask the “what if” and “have you considered” questions from their vast experience with helping other healthcare organizations complete similar projects.  Experience is key in clinical EMR data migrations, and legacy healthcare data archive companies have the required expertise.

Archival as a strategy for legacy data

A solid legacy health data archive can be a smart step forward in managing historical patient and operational data well into the future. This solution offers compliance with the numerous local, state and national regulations.  It also provides a single, easy-to-use solution for discovering historical information as its needed by payers, patient, employers and lawyers in years to come. As healthcare systems move toward a single go-forward EHR system in the future, so too should they streamline to a single archive to shore up the multitude of both ambulatory and acute care systems acquired along the way.

“We’ve helped hundreds of healthcare providers save their data in an archive,”  says James E. Hammer, PMP, Vice President, Product & Program Management at Harmony Healthcare IT.  “Archiving reduces maintenance costs for legacy systems and alleviates the need to keep personnel trained on how to use multiple systems.  There are significant benefits to having historical records in one archive.”

Is your healthcare organization in the midst of a merger or acquisition? Are you in search of assistance for how to manage the data?  We can help.