Value based care reimbursement models challenge healthcare providers to provide higher quality care at a lower cost.  As a result, many hospitals are looking more closely at supply chain management to drive quality, safety and long-term value.  Yet, according to a Cardinal Health and SERMO survey completed earlier this year, 78% of hospital staff still work within a manual inventory management process for some part of their supply chain.

That means, in a world where historical data insights drive improvements, access to legacy supply chain data may not be easy to come by.  At best, legacy data pertinent to supply, demand, utilization, and ordering patterns are easily accessible through technology at a mere 22% of hospitals. However, many hospitals are indicating a desire to implement technology to support these areas.

If you’re among the hospitals considering adopting new technologies to support supply chain management or broader Enterprise Resource Planning strategies, here’s a round-up of leading vendors in the space. You’ll note, in the article, that only 4 percent of the organizations indicating adoption of a supply chain management tool used a proprietary software package to monitor inventory.

According to a RevCycle Intelligence article covering the Cardinal Health and SERMO survey results, hospitals that do utilize supply chain management automation may want to consider upgrading, “especially since survey respondents scored their facility’s legacy inventory management systems low on benchmarking abilities and visibility into inventory.”

A key to successful supply chain management lies in data. Whether or not you have technology in place today to support your process or are considering new system(s) for the future, taking time to analyze the data at each stage in your hospital’s supply selection and ordering process will help you understand organizational habits. From there, you can build an informed strategy to save where possible and improve patient safety.

Change is happening now. With an Enterprise Resource Planning system or an independent supply chain technology that manages aspects or even all of the process, the possibilities of understanding and reducing operational costs improve greatly, contributing to a stronger financial future for your hospital and others nationwide.

Looking to preserve the integrity of your legacy supply chain management data? Want to further explore how to help your legacy data work in harmony with your new system implementation? Talk to our EMR and ERP data archiving experts today.

With the holiday season in full force, we once again took the time to give back to those in the community who are less fortunate than ourselves. At Harmony Healthcare IT (HHIT) we continued the tradition from last year of adopting three families from the St. Vincent DePaul Society and singing to local assisted living centers. We wrapped up the year on a high note, sharing our singing voices and gifts to those in need.

“It was a cool experience to be able to give my time to help make someone’s day better.  I think the adopt-a-family is one of the best outreaches HHIT participates in, because having presents to unwrap really helps make Christmas more special.” says Solution Engineer, Jake Carson.

“The woman we delivered gifts to seemed truly thankful, and it is a good reminder that there are so many who are far less fortunate than we are.  What struck me is that what most of the families asked for were clothes and blankets — some of the most basic necessities.  That really indicates their level of need, and it shows how blessed we are when we have the means to give to them in that way.”

To all our employees, friends, families and clients– thank you for making 2017 successful. Here’s to a bright 2018 and a great holiday season.

Clearwater, FL and South Bend, IN – December 12, 2017 – FairWarning, Inc., a leading provider of solutions which expand trust in mission critical applications such as Electronic Health Records (EHRs), and cloud-based applications, today announced that it has joined forces with Harmony Healthcare IT, a leader in EHR and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) legacy data management.  This is the first time a discrete data archiving company has been certified by FairWarning to implement its audit platform for monitoring the long-term security of historical patient and employee record storage.

Healthcare organizations are faced with managing massive amounts of data, and they need to streamline and secure that data throughout its entire lifecycle to meet record retention mandates and compliance regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). Together, FairWarning and Harmony Healthcare IT ensure that electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI) within Harmony Healthcare IT’s Health Data Archiver (HDA) product is monitored and protected for unusual activity and compliance through FairWarning’s Patient Privacy Monitoring Platform.

“Legacy data represents a considerable amount of ePHI that must be retained sometimes up to 25 years or more. As healthcare providers continue to replace EHR and ERP systems, more and more data is being migrated to a secure and accessible archive solution,” said Jim Hammer, vice president, product and program management at Harmony Healthcare IT. “Our product, Health Data Archiver, already has audit log capabilities built in, but, FairWarning provides an added layer of protection with ongoing monitoring and alerts of potential threats for the lifetime of record management.”

“As insider threats and cybercriminals have advanced their tactics to obtain patient data, healthcare organizations have become proactive in monitoring and securing ePHI, as an integral part of patient care,” said Scott Baker, Director of Alliances at FairWarning. “Hospitals that are already using FairWarning to monitor and protect their full-production EHRs can now also protect their consolidated historical records from other legacy systems for a wholistic and compliant patient data-protection program.”

About FairWarning^®

FairWarning^® is a leading provider of privacy and information security solutions which expand trust in mission critical applications such as Salesforce, Electronic Health Records and cloud-based applications. Auditing over 300 business applications, FairWarning solutions empower businesses globally to grow their reputation with their customers, increase velocity in their business and comply with complex federal and state privacy laws such as HIPAA, PCI, SOX, FISMA and EU Data Protection Act. FairWarning provides a comprehensive platform and managed services for performing forensic investigations of applications, enforcing access policies, conducting legal investigations, and improving compliance effectiveness. FairWarning catches people stealing your data.

About Harmony Healthcare IT

Since 2006, health IT analysts at Harmony Healthcare IT have extracted demographic, financial, clinical and administrative data for hundreds of healthcare provider organizations – 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, archival, retention, integration and analytics to provide its clients with trusted solutions. Working with hundreds of applications, billions of records and petabytes of data; Harmony Healthcare IT with its product, Health Data Archiver, provides clients with access to historical records. Simply. For more information about the company, visit: www.harmonyhit.com. For information about Health Data Archiver, visit: www.healthdataarchiver.com

Harmony Healthcare IT is the maker of Health Data Archiver, a secure long-term storage solution for patient and employee information.  A company of this kind — handling critical and protected data of this sort — requires dependable, honest and hard-working team members.  And, that’s exactly what we have.  We have a team that cares not only about the work we do but also about each other and our community.

As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches, we thank our team of data experts, project managers, analysts, developers, engineers, administrators and market representatives for giving us all they’ve got.  Thank you for exceeding the expectations of our prospects and clients.  Thank you for your camaraderie, creativity and commitment to our simple yet meaningful core values.  We would not be thriving if it weren’t for each and every one of you.

Each day “we get data.”  This weekend, we’ll take a well-deserved break and go get some pie!

Enjoy a safe and healthy holiday weekend with family and friends.

Recent news that eClinicalWorks (eCW) is being sued for nearly $1 billion for inaccurate medical records is a tough follow-up to the $155 million settlement just six months ago to resolve a False Claims Act suit that claimed it gave customers kickbacks to publicly promote its products.

The new suit claims that eCW failed in its fiduciary duty and exhibited gross negligence which led to the death of Stjepan Tot, a cancer patient who was unable to determine reliably when his first symptoms of cancer appeared [as] his medical records failed to accurately display his medical history on progress notes.

The suit claims that millions of patients have compromised electronic health records as eCWs’ software didn’t meet meaningful use and certification requirements laid out by the Office of the National Coordinator.

In the prior suit, the Department of Justice ordered eCW to facilitate transferring its data to rival EHRs for free as well as institute several watchdog measures.

eCW’s website states it currently serves 130,000 customers in the United States and 850,000 globally.

The State of Malpractice Claims and EHRs

In general, malpractice claims that involve EHRs have increased over the past ten years. A recent report from The Doctors Company states that there were 97 claims from 2007 – June-2014 and 66 claims from July 2014 to year-end 2016. The study only includes closed claims.

The top allegations are Diagnosis-related including a failure, delay or wrong diagnosis and Medication-related including improper management, wrong dose or wrong medication.

The report suggests: Many EHR-related problems could have been avoided if the federal government had developed vendor standards for EHR use and interoperability and required beta testing in the healthcare environment to ensure usability and safety before the HITECH Act mandated its widespread adoption in 2009.

Bottom line is the EHR is considered a legal record and can be used in court either for or against a doctor or provider organization.

Archiving Supports Potential Need for eDiscovery and a Secure Solution for Legacy EHRs

If your organization is affected by the eCW lawsuits or just looking for a secure storage solution for legacy data from out-of-production EHRs, an archive could provide an opportunity to efficiently consolidate numerous disparate systems into one streamlined, vendor neutral repository.

A well-planned legacy data management strategy alleviates future IT costs, risks and burdens as platforms come and go. Long-term medical data archive vendors that know the EMR market inside and out offer secure solutions that ensure data integrity and meet HIPAA, state and agency medical record retention requirements.

If your organization is working through the burden of what to do with its eCW system or with having numerous outdated legacy systems, this might be the time to contact Harmony Healthcare IT, the makers of Health Data Archiver, for a consultation about system replacement and data retention.

Download a complimentary copy of our legal whitepaper on eDiscovery and Healthcare Record Retention today.

When it comes time to replace the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system or Human Resource Management System (HRMS) in your healthcare facility, you must decide where, how and for what duration to store the employee and HR data.

What Regulations Govern Employee and HR Data Retention?

While HIPAA is a driving factor for employee data retention at healthcare facilities, there are a few other federal employee data retention requirements that apply to all organizations:

• The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Regulations require employers to retain personnel or employment records for one year.
• The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) states that employers must keep payroll records for a minimum of three years and any records that might be needed to explain wage discrepancies for employees of the opposite sex for a minimum of two years.

Other federal laws regarding the retention of employee records and HR information often depend on the number of employees at an organization. Those record retention requirements might range anywhere from one to 30 years. The Society of Human Resource Management has a good consolidation of guidelines from those requirements that you can read here and a table of Federal Record Retention Requirements you can access here.

• According the United States Department of Labor, The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires “the retention of occupational medical records for 30 years after termination of a worker for the purpose of providing access to the records for employees and their representatives after a worker has left employment. Both employee medical and exposure records must be retained.”

How To Store Employee and HR Data Long-term

When your employee record retention policy requires data storage for the long haul (i.e., up to 30 years or beyond) and, especially if the systems that store your employee data have been replaced by a newer system, you may need to seek an archive vendor and solution.  When it comes to decommissioning legacy human resources software that stores employee and HR data, a legacy data management strategy is an important consideration.  Whether you are retiring one, four or 14 legacy systems at once, a legacy data management strategy from an expert archiving vendor helps guide decisions around system retirement prioritization.  It also provides a common data retention methodology and framework.

Getting Started

If your healthcare organization is in need of employee or HR data storage long-term, contact Harmony Healthcare IT, the makers of Health Data Archiver.

Approximately 62 million people – nearly one in five Americans – live in rural and frontier areas. As we recognize National Rural Health Day on November 16, let’s consider the healthcare landscape that is responsible for 20 percent of the people in the U.S.

Funding is Tight

The big picture for rural hospitals is that most are cash strapped and approximately 41 percent of rural hospitals faced negative operating margins in 2016, a recent Chartis Group and iVantage Health Analytics study of over 2,100 rural hospitals revealed.

Further, twelve percent of rural hospitals indicate they are not considering HIT investments because of cost concerns compared to 3 percent of urban hospitals.

Prepare for the future with out-of-the-box thinking and smart planning

While rural hospitals and small acute care facilities do face challenges, there are opportunities to survive and even thrive by adapting to a market-based, patient-centered approach that provides real value to patients and other stakeholders. By embracing transparency, increased accountability and a consumer-centered model for health care, rural hospitals can provide higher-quality care at a lower cost.

Perhaps one of the most important roles rural hospitals can play is with managing population health. It is becoming more and more important for the EHR to become the CHR – Comprehensive Health Record – which combines data points on a patient’s emotional state, sleep patterns, family dynamics and other key factors that contribute to overall health. This information and care delivery that often is a part of the rural healthcare experience is gaining popularity for contributing to overall improvements in patient outcomes.

Collaboration and Cost Sharing are Key

Many remote hospitals are finding new and innovative ways to survive. Rural hospitals are forming accountable care organizations, creating patient-centered medical homes and launching initiatives to improve the health of their communities. “The key to the success of these efforts is collaboration,” says Brock Slabach, senior vice president of member services for the National Rural Health Association. As those who live miles from their closest neighbor know, working together can mean survival, and few know it better than rural hospital CEOs.

Accessible Archive Provides Complete Patient Narrative and Cost Savings  

One of the easiest steps forward in cost savings and technology leadership for a rural hospital CIO is to create a solid long-term plan for legacy EHR and/or ERP systems. Often, legacy systems are left operating in read-only format, creating technical vulnerability and running up unnecessary charges.

It is important to comply with record retention regulations.  That requires a HIPAA-compliant medical data storage solution that can secure records for the long-term — typically anywhere from seven to 25+ years based on state mandate.  That’s a long time to keep a replaced billing, human resources or EMR system up and running in tandem with new system – especially if there happens to be more than one legacy system.

Servers age.  Software applications must be maintained with the latest upgrades.  Users who know how to navigate the old system may leave for a new job.  For these and other reasons, the legacy system poses risk, not to mention cost and labor burden.  Should release of information be required to fulfill a request from a patient, lawyer, employer, payer or auditor; the patient clinical and financial history must be secure, accessible, discoverable and easy to share in a HIPAA-compliant format.

To avoid risk and to be compliant with record retention mandates, legacy system decommissioning and data archival are important components of any system replacement.  Affordable yet secure solutions exist for rural hospitals to extract data from a retired application and migrate it into an electronic archive.  This transition of PHI from a full production system into a more static yet HIPAA-compliant, browser-based relational database allows the hospital to:

• stop paying software maintenance to the legacy vendor
• remove the aging server from its technical infrastructure
• ensure that historical records are consolidated and accessible in a viewer that is easily accessible over time as employees come and go
• comply with record retention regulations

We can help your rural hospital or acute center create a systemized plan to archive the legacy EHR or ERP that exists in numerous data silos across your organization.

A solid legacy data archive can be a smart step forward in managing historical patient and operational data well into the future. It offers compliance with the numerous local, state and national regulations and a single, easy to use solution for historical information. As healthcare systems streamline their go-forward systems, so too should they streamline their archiving systems to support easy and efficient record retrieval.

If your rural facility has questions about the most effective and economical means for healthcare information archiving, contact Harmony Healthcare IT, the makers of Health Data Archiver.

The Comprehensive Health Record (CHR) is more than just a new acronym in healthcare IT. The CHR represents a growing expectation that the electronic health record can and should expand its role to provide a broader record of each patient’s health picture, which ultimately should lead to better patient health outcomes.

Epic CEO, Judy Faulkner, is credited with coining the term CHR at this year’s Epic user group meeting. She explained at the event that CHRs must provide information that is not in the EHR now, including social and community care documentation provided outside of the hospital or clinic walls.  Faulkner refers to tracking and recording social determinants – like other countries do — such as what a patient is eating, how they’re sleeping or if they are feeling lonely or connected in their life.  She says these elements are notably important in ensuring patient health.

While many EHR vendors report they are working on incorporating more interoperability into their systems, the key continues to be data integration. Cerner’s President, Zane Burke promised: the vendor would equip next-generation interoperability with the ability for “data to flow freely,” between its own Millennium EHR and other vendors’ software.

As EHRs evolve and technology advancements continue, the reality exists that most health systems have numerous legacy systems that are outdated. These legacy systems were designed and implemented long ago and simply cannot be expected to fulfill future CHR demands.  In fact, unless the data from these systems is securely made available to the CHR, it could become vulnerable from a usability or security standpoint.

One solution to keep pace with the still ever-expanding volume of health data we may begin to collect as a part of a CHR is to create a legacy data management plan that could include a secure and searchable archive of all patient historical data. The ability to access and search legacy records compliments the role of the CHR by shoring up and maintaining the fuller clinical patient narrative, potentially making it available via single sign-on from the CHR.

Are you ready to create a legacy data management strategy that will truly enable your organization to be nimble and equipped to meet future CHR expectations? Download our “Creating a Legacy Data Management Strategy” document for an outline of a five point strategy that is customized for each organization and rounded out with a commitment for collaborative execution. Perhaps the best part of the strategy is that it identifies significant areas to mitigate risks and provide cost savings.

We look forward to connecting to help you have everything you need to guide your EHRs into the “comprehensive” future.

Consolidation in the EHR Market is Causing System Replacement

Recently, it was announced that Allscripts bought McKesson’s electronic health record (EHR) and revenue cycle management (RCM) tools. For many of the larger hospitals and health systems using McKesson, that may mean an EHR and RCM system replacement is on the horizon with movement away from McKesson’s Paragon solution (which may now be directed toward smaller hospitals).

Earlier this year, it was also announced that the largest health IT vendors, Epic and Cerner, are now beating out MEDITECH in the small hospital markets, a niche where MEDITECH has traditionally maintained its foothold.

EHR Replacement may also call for ERP Replacement

If your hospital intends to replace electronic health record (EHR) systems such as McKesson, MEDITECH – or even other integrated EHR/ERP systems like CPSI — there are many functions beyond standard EHR you may also need to replace.  Those functions are Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) related – like human resources, payroll, accounts receivable or materials management.

Positioning for so much change in one system overhaul is possible, and, it may even have its advantages. Not only will you reap the benefits of a new EHR, but, also of a cutting-edge stand-alone ERP system for potentially even more effective human capital, financial and supply chain management.

Decommissioning EHR or ERP Systems Require a Legacy Data Management Plan

The big questions regarding EHR or ERP system replacement center around data conversion.  What legacy data will your new vendor(s) allow you to migrate to the new system(s)?  After that is determined, the next step is to plan what to do with the rest of the historical patient, employee, and business data.

At Harmony Healthcare IT (HHIT), data experts help healthcare delivery organizations develop a legacy data management strategy aimed at creating patient, employee and business record retention plans that meet state, federal and agency regulations.  With its solution, Health Data Archiver, HHIT guides your data governance team through a process which considers legacy system inventory, financial forecast and system prioritization for decommissioning EMR and ERP systems enterprise-wide.

Taking the First Step

If you take inventory of the various ERP functions currently integrated into the MEDITECH, McKesson or CPSI EHR that you intend to replace, you can work with a data management partner like Harmony Healthcare IT to retain records from those modules as well as the EHR modules – all in one archive – for easy user access for years to come.

If you are facing questions around the impact your EHR conversion may have on the entire organization, including HR and finance, we can help each team sort through the answers. Contact us to get started on replacing your integrated EHR/ERP system so we can get a comprehensive system discovery underway.

Earlier this year, Harmony Healthcare IT partnered with Commvault, a global leader in enterprise backup, recovery, archive and the cloud, to integrate the Commvault Data Platform with Harmony Healthcare IT’s data storage solution, Health Data Archiver.  This partnership allows healthcare organizations to decommission legacy Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems yet provide secure access to clinical and business data long-term.

In Washington DC, November 6-8, 2017, Harmony Healthcare IT team members Scott Kidder and Tom Liddell will speak at Commvault Go, an event that will bring together industry thought leaders, customers, partners and Commvault executives to discuss market forces and technology innovations – including the emergence of software defined storage, the continued rise of Big Data and the move toward computing in the cloud.  The Harmony Healthcare IT session, entitled “Successfully Manage Your Legacy Applications,” is aimed at healthcare provider organizations which manage a few hundred applications to run both its clinical and business operations. As these organizations evolve through investment in new technology, mergers, acquisitions, etc. – applications are retired from active use and become “legacy” applications. While maintaining these legacy applications to preserve the corresponding data, healthcare organizations are expending resources to maintain a retired system that is likely siloed from the rest of the application/data ecosystem and is often technicall vulnerable. In this session, registrants will learn more about how Health Data Archiver can help successfully decommission legacy applications while remaining compliant with data retention policies.  The session will also cover the added benefits that legacy system retirement brings, including the reduction in operational costs and the development of a strategy to simplify the management and access to critical legacy data.

If you’d like more information about the Commvault platform and how to successfully manage the legacy EMR and ERP applications at your healthcare facility, contact us.